Sentence of 20 years for alleged critic of regime was upheld a day after controversial football deal was sealedThe sister of a Saudi aid worker jailed for tweeting criticism of the regime has spoken of her shock and anger after the Saudi-led takeover of Newcastle United was approved just 24 hours after the state upheld her brother’s 20-year sentence.Areej al-Sadhan said she had not spoken to her brother, Abdulrahman, for years and warned Newcastle fans that the club’s reputation was now firmly tied to the actions of the Saudi regime and its de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman. She claimed her brother had been repeatedly abused in custody and called on the UK government to properly investigate who controls the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) that now owns 80% of Newcastle. She said the club would now be “complicit in partnering with a savage person who murders people and tortures them”. Continue reading...

Comments made as talks begin in Qatar to discuss allowing foreigners and at-risk Afghans to evacuateThe Taliban has ruled out cooperation with the US to contain extremist groups in Afghanistan, staking out an uncompromising position on a key issue ahead of the first direct talks between the former foes since the US withdrew from the country in August.Senior Taliban officials and US representatives are to meet on Saturday and Sunday in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Continue reading...

Independent force will look into judgment supporting former officer Rhona Malone’s claim of victimisationAn independent review has been ordered after a tribunal found evidence of a “sexist culture” in Scotland’s armed policing.The case was brought by former officer Rhona Malone against Police Scotland alleging sex discrimination and victimisation. Continue reading...

Taskforce says on Saturday that 968 people died with authorities blaming low vaccination rate

The red-hot eruption from the volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma was accompanied by flashes of lightning early on Saturday. A study published in 2016 by the journal Geophysical Research Letters found lightning can be produced during volcanic eruptions because the collision of ash particles creates an electrical charge

The comedian, 62, on growing up shy in Middlesbrough, losing his dad, meeting Vic Reeves, and the deep contentment of fishingI was quite a shy boy. Growing up in Middlesbrough, I felt a bit of an outsider. My three elder brothers are funny and boisterous and I was in awe of them. I felt like an appendage. It’s probably the curse of being a younger kid. I’ve seen some become the loudest because they fight for their place, and others retreat to the fringes. I was in the latter group.If you’re the quietest at home, it’s tough to find a voice. I’ve always been quite a good mate to have because of that. If I ever did make a connection with anyone, it was very precious to me. My friendships are everything. Continue reading...

Lockdown and ‘looking after the grandmas’ may have kept the Rage Against the Machine guitarist away from recent protests – but he refuses to be silencedTom Morello has made more than 20 albums, as a founding member of Rage Against the Machine – the political rap-rock band who have sold 16m records, and whose 1992 track Killing in the Name has become a perennial protest anthem – and of the bands Audioslave and Prophets of Rage. He also plays solo under the name the Nightwatchman, and has toured with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. His unique approach to the guitar, which he has self-deprecatingly described as “making R2-D2 noises”, has led to him regularly being voted as one of the greatest guitar players of all time. His latest album, The Atlas Underground Fire (released on 15 October), features a series of collaborations recorded in lockdown – with Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Damian Marley and Bring Me the Horizon, among others. He is a celebrated “nonsectarian socialist” political activist, famed for performing at demonstrations – he played at Occupy events across the US and Europe – and a co-founder of the nonprofit “social justice” organisation Axis of Justice.You recorded your new album in lockdown. Did the pandemic also mean you missed out on the ongoing protests in the US?

First president after 1979 Islamic revolution clashed with clerics and fled to exile in France a year laterAbolhassan Bani-Sadr, who became Iran’s first president after the 1979 Islamic revolution before fleeing into exile in France, has died aged 88.He died on Saturday at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris following a long illness, his wife and children said on Bani-Sadr’s official website. Continue reading...

Buildings near the crater on the Spanish island were engulfed by lava on Saturday morningBuildings near the volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma have been engulfed by rivers of lava, with the drama of the red-hot eruption intensified by the spectacle of flashes of lightning.The magma destroyed at least four buildings in the village of Callejon de la Gata, witnesses said. Continue reading...

The comedian and her dad recreate a childhood photo and talk about early days in India, agoraphobia and swapping banking for comedyBorn in New Delhi in 1969, Sindhu Vee spent her childhood in India and the Philippines, before throwing herself into academia, getting degrees from Oxford, Montreal and Chicago universities. In her early 40s, she traded the world of investment banking for standup comedy. Her career quickly ascended, with appearances on QI, Have I Got News for You, Radio 4 and Netflix’s forthcoming adaptation of Matilda. She lives in London with her husband and three children; she is currently touring her new show Alphabet. Continue reading...

A sandstorm made by powerful winds whipping up dust from the ground has engulfed Barretos and surrounding towns north of the city of São Paulo. The storms were triggered by the worst drought to hit Brazil in nine decades, which depleted hydroelectric reservoirs, forcing the grid operator to fire up more expensive thermoelectric plants and the government to implement a 'water scarcity' power rate. Continue reading...

Taiwan reiterates it is a sovereign nation after Xi says its ‘separatism’ is biggest ‘danger to national rejuvenation’China’s president, Xi Jinping, has vowed to realise “reunification” with Taiwan by peaceful means, after a week of heightened tensions in the Taiwan Strait.Taiwan responded shortly after by calling on Beijing to abandon its “coercion”, reiterating that only Taiwan’s people could decide their future. Continue reading...

Evidence is mounting that Northern Ireland is failing. A different constitutional future seems increasingly likelyA powerful new play has just opened at Belfast’s Lyric theatre. The Border Game, by Michael Patrick and Oisín Kearney, is a fractured love story and a sharp political satire about the legacy of partition. Its setting is an abandoned customs hut on boggy ground beside a broken barbed-wire fence that marks the border between Northern Ireland, where Henry lives, and the Republic, where Sinead lives. The play is moving, honourable, and just a little bit messy. You get the impression the ending might change in the course of its run. But somehow this rawness at the edges seems quite befitting.The former lovers, who still appear to be in love, attempt to tell each other why they separated, each of them wounded by the conviction that it was the choice of the other. They have survived, but they are haunted by the proximity of others who did not. There is a ruinous sense of responsibility to the dead. Resorting to desperate hilarity, they come up with a word: “Borderfucked. Twelve letters. The condition of being fucked economically, socially and psychologically due to the stroke of a pen. Common in Ireland, the Middle East, and all over the fucking world.”Susan McKay is an Irish writer and journalist whose books include Northern Protestants – On Shifting Ground Continue reading...

Press groups and rights activists hail peace prize won by vocal critic of Philippine president Rodrigo DuterteVeteran Philippine journalist Maria Ressa has said her Nobel peace prize was for “all journalists around the world” as she vowed to continue her battle for press freedom.Ressa, co-founder of news website Rappler, and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov were awarded the prize on Friday for their efforts to “safeguard freedom of expression”. Continue reading...

The Australian composer has returned to performing after a 10-year break. He writes about fame, failure and his surprise comebackIn 2003, I booked a tiny venue for Melbourne fringe festival, to perform a show I had tortuously titled Navel: Cerebral Melodies With Umbilical Chords. It was a sort of dark, ridiculous cabaret, and a desperate attempt to shake off the pain of all the rejections I had been getting (agents/record companies/the dude who approves small loans at the bank), by showcasing my various “talents”, which arguably included unusually clear diction, considerable manual dexterity, and a love of cheap double entendre. (Which is to say there were some outstanding jokes about fingering.)Navel was a gamechanger for me, because I knew I had an unusual toolkit, and although I knew I had a tendency to play the clown, I didn’t by any stretch think of myself as a comedian. But that night, everything changed: the 30-odd weirdos perched on bar stools and chaises longues laughed. A lot. Continue reading...

It started in bed one morning when I realised I hadn’t had an original thought for months. I needed someone to make me wake upFor some reason it takes me two and a half hours to email my life coach. I write “email life coach guy” on my to-do list. I have a really long shower. I riffle through a stack of unopened New Yorkers, and pretend I am either going to read them, or leave them in my building’s lobby for my neighbours to claim, and in the end I do neither. I watch a 20-minute YouTube video about Amir Khan’s boxing career (“The legendary speed of Amir Khan!”), then check Wikipedia to see how he fared in the fight the video was trailing (an embarrassing knockout). I send three tweets and scroll Instagram. I stand at the fridge and eat some hummus with a plain cracker for no reason at all. Finally, I sit and write the email. It is 36 words long. Tomas, the life coach, writes back almost immediately. That was the absolute last thing I wanted.The pandemic was broadly fine for me. I worked at home anyway, so I didn’t have any shock adjustment to make. I didn’t (and still don’t) have any children to look after, so there wasn’t any particular agony with my many lives layering on top of each other in a confined space. My girlfriend, Hannah, and I did the usual things to stay sane when confronted with seemingly endless periods of time and no real social life: jigsaws, taking too long to cook dinner, a Sopranos rewatch. Continue reading...

Morals and duty clash in le Carré’s tale of a bookseller caught in a spy leak• Fintan O’Toole on the last twist in le Carré’s tale• Writers reveal their favourite le Carré

The Queen drummer and singer-songwriter on former girlfriends, forgetting lyrics and liking red wineBorn in Norfolk, Roger Taylor, 72, is an original member of the band Queen, which formed in 1970. Their hits include Bohemian Rhapsody, We Will Rock You and Radio Ga Ga. Taylor’s new solo album is Outsider, and he is currently on tour in the UK. The Queen + Adam Lambert’s Rhapsody European tour takes place next year. Taylor is married, has five children and lives in Surrey and Cornwall.When were you happiest?

Thin characterisation and a superficial critique of wealth inequality post-apartheid keep Uga Carlini’s fiction in first gearThe colourful opening of Uga Carlini’s Angeliena suggests a giddy ride awaits: the camera follows a suitcase plastered with travel stickers moving along a conveyor belt at an airport. But such vibrant detail only points up the film’s lack of emotional substance. A parking attendant for a posh hospital in South Africa, Angeliena (Euodia Samson) dreams of travelling the world, she adorns her little shack with tourist posters from faraway lands. At work, Angeliena brings a glow to the austere parking lot, pinning red roses that she grows herself to the windscreen wipers of fancy SUVs.Such sweet-natured actions are presumably intended to endear Angeliena to us, yet reduce her to a unidimensional worker with a heart of gold. The thinness of the characterisation is made more pronounced by the cartoonishly evil Dr Mitchell (Colin Moss), the hospital owner and Angeliena’s antagonist, a spewer of Trumpian one-liners. Ludicrously, the film takes a tone-deaf turn when Angeliena is revealed to be suffering from an unnamed muscular atrophy that motivates her to finally embark on her world trip. Out of the blue, she develops facial tics. The only affecting sequences are the few-and-far-between gatherings between Angeliena and her eccentric female friends. Continue reading...

Green social prescribing, where people are referred to nature projects, on the rise across UK“It sounds dramatic, but this place saved my life,” says Wendy Turner, looking out over the Steart salt marshes in Somerset. “I am really loving the colours of all the marsh grasses at the moment, and the flocks of dunlin and plover. The light is just so beautiful.”Turner was once a high-flying international project manager. “But the Covid pandemic resulted in me losing everything – my business and my home – and I had years of abuse in a marriage.” In July 2020, she attempted suicide and woke up in A&E. Continue reading...

NSW health department says that 136 staff members have resigned ‘due to their position on Covid-19 vaccination’

Facility in Tripoli overcrowded after 5,000 migrants arrested in the country in past weekAt least five migrants have been shot dead at a Tripoli detention centre amid a mass escape from the overcrowded facility.Libyan security forces have detained more than 5,000 migrants, refugees and asylum seekers mostly from sub-Saharan Africa in a crackdown over the past week, housing them in crowded, unsanitary detention centres, the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR has said. Continue reading...

Early in pandemic ex MP intended drugs as Covid treatment but they were never used outside clinical trials

Routinely outshone in the polls by Jacinda Ardern, Collins now faces a challenge from a rival right-wing party“There are three ways in which opposition leaders end being opposition leaders,” the National party’s leader, Judith Collins, says: “one, they give up – well, that’s not happening. Two, they get rolled – that’s not happening, and three, they become prime minister. That’s the one I’m after.”Collins may be resolute in her desire to bag the country’s top leadership role, but the opposition’s dismal ratings are hard to ignore. Recent polls show the party’s ratings have slumped to 23%, Collin’s preferred prime minister ranking is trailing that of prime minister Jacinda Ardern by 39 points, and the leader of the smaller rival right-wing Act party has overtaken her in the popularity contest. Continue reading...

Cuthbert Mutukwa fears disastrous consequences for home country if UK cuts go ahead as it nears ‘mine-free’ statusA Zimbabwean man who helped clear hundreds of landmines from the Falkland Islands has urged Britain not to go ahead with cuts that would see the government pull funding from his home country just as it nears “mine-free” status.Cuthbert Mutukwa, 42, left his family in Zimbabwe to work for two years de-mining the Falkland Islands, the British overseas territory that was peppered with about 13,000 mines by Argentinian forces during the 1982 war. Continue reading...

Novelist Maaza Mengiste on how the Nobel laureate has explored exile in all its forms throughout his careerFor more than three decades, Abdulrazak Gurnah has been writing with a quiet and unwavering conviction about those relegated to the forgotten corners of history. Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah fled political oppression and settled in England at the age of 18. The author of numerous short stories and essays, as well as 10 novels, he has dedicated his writing career to examining the many ways that human beings can find themselves in exile: from their homes, families and communities and, perhaps most importantly, from themselves. His novels unfold in the intimate spaces created by families, companions and friendships: those spaces that are nurtured by love and duty yet rendered vulnerable by their very nature. In book after book, he guides us through seismic historic moments and devastating societal ruptures while gently outlining what it is that keeps those families, friendships and loving spaces intact, if not fully whole.Many of his books, including his first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), grapple with betrayals and broken promises on the part of the state or those in power, and focus on people who leave home in search of better lives. His second novel, Paradise, which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker prize, is set just before the first world war and is a heartfelt – and heartbreaking – exploration of the costs of German colonialism and political aggression. In hindsight, it feels like a precursor to his latest novel, Afterlives (2020), which opens in the midst of a 1907 uprising against German colonisers and unfolds to offer us psychologically complex characters who, over generations and through transitions from German to British rule, struggle to maintain their families and communities in a small coastal town in mainland Tanzania. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Lady Newlove confident of cross-party support for amendment, despite PM’s stanceConservative peers and MPs will defy Boris Johnson’s stance that misogyny should not be a hate crime and push ahead with attempts to change the law, the Guardian understands.The former victims’ commissioner and Conservative peer Helen Newlove is leading the charge, tabling an amendment to the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, currently at committee stage in the House of Lords. Continue reading...

Ursula von der Leyen says European Commission will decide on next steps to takeThe head of the European Commission has vowed a swift response to a ruling from Poland’s top court rejecting the supremacy of EU law, which has thrown relations between Brussels and Warsaw into a crisis.Ursula von der Leyen said she was deeply concerned by Thursday’s ruling of the Polish constitutional tribunal, which concluded that basic principles of EU law were incompatible with Poland’s constitution. “I have instructed the commission’s services to analyse it thoroughly and swiftly. On this basis, we will decide on next steps,” she said in her first public statement on the matter. Continue reading...

Transplant patients take immune-suppressing drugs and non-vaccinated recipients are more likely to die of infectionHealth systems in Colorado and Washington are removing unvaccinated patients from organ transplant lists, given research that unprotected recipients are much more likely to die from Covid-19.UCHealth in Colorado told a patient on the kidney transplant waiting list that she needed to get vaccinated in the next 30 days or she would be removed from the list. Leilani Lutali told 9News that she was the patient in question, and she hasn’t been vaccinated yet because of her religious views. Continue reading...

In her new memoir, New York City Ballet’s first Asian-American soloist speaks out about racism and sexual bullying in ballet. Now she wants to overhaul the industry from withinWhen Georgina Pazcoguin was 19 years old, she went to see a doctor about her thighs. A dancer at the New York City Ballet, Pazcoguin had previously had what was known among dancers as “the fat talk” with the company’s then leader, Peter Martins. During their meeting Martins had told her she didn’t “fit in”, silently indicating the area between her backside and her knees. And so, following a recommendation from a friend, she visited the office of one Dr Wilcox, who told her she should consume no more than 720 calories a day – the recommended number for the average woman is closer to 2,000 – and gave her some sealed packets of powder. For the next four months, she subsisted on the powder, plus a single chicken breast and two pounds of spinach or lettuce, which would make up her evening meal.“No one wants to be told their body is insufficient,” says Pazcoguin, now 36. “I mean, line is essential in my business; there is a certain aesthetic [that is expected]. But I am not an ectomorph. As a dancer you are staring at your body all day long in a mirror. But to try to intimidate me to make me look like this stick figure? Some women are just born a particular way. And there [should be] flexibility within the ballet world for more body types than just this waif-thin idea.” Continue reading...

Filipina and Russian given 2021 award as organisers warn of threat to independent media worldwide

The controversial TV pundit recently overtook Marine Le Pen in presidential election opinion pollsHe has been convicted for inciting racial hatred, attacked by historians for claiming the Nazi collaborator Marshal Philippe Pétain saved French Jews rather than aiding their deportation to death camps, and was this week described by the French justice minister as a dangerous racist and Holocaust denier.But Éric Zemmour, a far-right French TV pundit, is rising so fast in opinion polls for president that one survey this week found he could make the final round of the April election and take 45% of the vote against the centrist Emmanuel Macron. Continue reading...

The former Australian prime minister uses a speech in Taipei to call on Beijing to ‘scale back the aggression’

The state government has also had to walk back from controversial Covid vaccination mandates for commonwealth and court system employees

Parents raise the alarm as Nadhim Zahawi admits he has no idea how many 12- to 15-year-olds have been vaccinatedMinisters have been accused of losing a grip on the Covid vaccination programme for teenagers with headteachers and parents describing a “haphazard” and “incredibly slow” rollout that is causing disruption in schools in England.They raised the alarm as Nadhim Zahawi, the education secretary, admitted he had no idea how many 12- to 15-year-olds had had their jabs, with early figures suggesting the government has little hope of hitting its target of vaccinating them all by half-term Continue reading...

Medical student Milad Rouf imprisoned for 15 years for doorstep attack that disfigured junior doctor Rym AlaouiA medical student who threw acid over his ex-girlfriend while disguised in a fat suit has been jailed for 15 years.Milad Rouf put on the disguise, which also included makeup and sunglasses, before throwing sulphuric acid over Rym Alaoui, his ex-girlfriend and a former colleague, when she came to the door of her home in May. Continue reading...

Supinder Kour and Deepak Chand were killed after being identified as a Sikh and Hindu, say witnessesTwo teachers have been shot dead by militants in a school in the Indian region of Kashmir, the latest in the spate of civilian killings that have targeted minorities and heightened tensions in the troubled state.Three assailants entered a government school in Eidgah, in the region’s capital, Srinagar, on Thursday morning and shot dead the principal, Supinder Kour, and her colleague, Deepak Chand. Continue reading...

Some believe Kremlin sees gas prices as chance for Gazprom to pressure west to speed up Nord Stream 2 approvalThe natural gas market has entered uncharted territory. The movements in the price of gas on Wednesday had been, in the words of one analyst, “unprecedented since the year dot of gas liberalisation in Europe”. In record swings, Dutch wholesale gas, a European benchmark, soared by 30% within one period of three or four hours from an already eye-watering level.These are chilling numbers for European governments with winter stretching ahead, and when the EU sneezes, the UK, heavily reliant on imports from across the Channel, also catches a cold. Continue reading...

An investigation by the Independent Commission Against Corruption led the now former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian to resign. While she denies any wrongdoing, her resignation has ignited a fresh debate about how to properly hold public officials to account. Lenore Taylor and Mike Ticher speak to Gabrielle Jackson about the role of anti-corruption commissions in holding politicians accountableRead more: Continue reading...

Now 73, the star of Hannah and Her Sisters shines in Jason Blum’s new horror. She talks about why audiences are hungry for mature movies, and her unhappiness at becoming an accidental poster girl for cosmetic surgeryIn 1973, Barbara Hershey – then known as Barbara Seagull, for reasons we’ll get into shortly – went on the popular US talkshow The Dick Cavett Show and torpedoed her career. She was on alongside her then partner, the actor David Carradine, but when Hershey/Seagull walked out on stage, she could hear their eight-month-old baby crying off-camera. So she ran off and returned with the little boy, named Free. Unfortunately, Free continued to fret. So Hershey/Seagull breastfed her baby live on air. Cavett was stunned and so, clearly, were the producers, who cut to commercials.“Did you breastfeed the baby earlier or was that my imagination?” Cavett asked when they returned, Free now fed. “I did it,” Hershey, then 25, replied, entirely unabashed. Continue reading...

Popular drama’s use of real South Korean number leads to thousands of prank calls and textsNetflix has edited out a phone number that appears in its hit series Squid Game after a South Korean woman and others who use similar combinations were deluged with calls – with some callers even asking to join the show’s life-or-death games.The South Korea-made production has topped Netflix popularity charts in 90 countries since its launch last month and is on track to become its most watched series ever. Continue reading...

Zanzibari novelist becomes first black African writer in 35 years to win prestigious awardThe Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.Gurnah grew up on one of the islands of Zanzibar before fleeing persecution and arriving in England as a student in the 1960s. He has published 10 novels as well as a number of short stories. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, said that the Tanzanian writer’s novels – from his debut Memory of Departure, about a failed uprising, to his most recent, Afterlives – “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world”. Continue reading...

Flashing is a sexual offence, victims say it can have a lifelong impact and experts say it can lead to escalating crimes against women. Why is the police response so often dismissive?Cathkin Braes country park, in south Glasgow, is beautiful. You can see the city and, behind it, the mountains. Clara (not her real name), a 35-year-old community worker from Glasgow, went there in March to enjoy the view from her campervan. As she relaxed, she looked over and saw a car parked beside her, with the passenger window rolled down. A man was staring at her, and masturbating. He clearly relished her visible fright. “That is what was turning him on,” Clara said. “His head was nearly out of the passenger window, staring at me.”Because she was in a campervan, it wasn’t easy to get away quickly: Clara had to get out to fold away some seats. “I decided to jump out,” she says, “and when I looked at him, he was wiping ejaculation off his dashboard and looking at me.” She took a photograph of his car numberplate and drove away. But the man realised what she had done and gave chase. For 15 minutes, he tailed her through the streets of Glasgow. Frightened for her life, Clara drove to a police station, but the man turned off before she arrived. Continue reading...

Preparatory work for ‘redoing’ of The Potato Eaters – savaged in his lifetime – to feature in exhibitionA collection of Vincent van Gogh’s preparatory drawings sketched ahead of a planned “redoing” of The Potato Eaters, a masterpiece brutally slated by buyers, friends and family at the time of its painting, are being exhibited for what is believed to be first time.The Dutch artist considered his depiction of a peasant family from the village of Nuenen in Brabant eating a meal of potatoes as one of only four of his works that could be regarded as important, alongside The Bedroom, Sunflowers and Augustine Roulin (La berceuse). Continue reading...

Nina Hoss and Lars Eidinger give finely acted performances as they play twins brought back together through illness – but who is saving who?Fine performances are at the heart of this film from Swiss writer-directors Véronique Reymond and Stéphanie Chuat, which rather resembles a classy television drama that might, in British terrestrial terms, be spread over three successive Sundays.Nina Hoss plays Lisa, an author and dramatist suffering from an emotional and professional block. Her life is on hold because her beloved twin brother Sven (Lars Eidinger), a celebrated classical stage actor in Berlin, has cancer, though he is now in remission due to the bone marrow transplant which she has been able to give him. Lisa comes to the clinic to bring him back temporarily to the chaotic family apartment in the city where their widowed mother Kathy (Marthe Keller) lives. The film’s original title is Schwesterlein and when we first see Sven he is sitting on the hospital bed with his headphones on, listening to Brahms’s song: “Schwesterlein, Schwesterlein, wann gehn wir nach Haus?” (“Little sister, little sister, when are we going home?”) Continue reading...

New freedoms are coming for those who have received both doses of vaccine. What plans are you making?

Residents living in buildings that have to be demolished due to defective blocks describe anguish“The house is going to fall. There is no doubt about that; it’s just a matter of when,” says Angeline Ruddy as she shows how her external walls are crumbling before her eyes.She and her family, including three small children, have lived with the threat of the walls collapsing around them for the past 12 years in a slow-motion disaster that has blighted an estimated 20,000 homes in of one of the most picturesque parts of Ireland. Nobody knows just how many homes have been hit by the so-called mica disaster but there are reports that homes across other counties are now being identified as part of the catastrophe. Continue reading...

A court in New York has granted the royal’s lawyers permission to see the confidential agreeement between his accuser and the late financierPrince Andrew will have a chance to review a 2009 settlement agreement that he hopes will shield him from a civil lawsuit accusing him of sexually abusing a woman two decades ago, when she was underage.In an order made in New York on Wednesday, US district judge Loretta Preska granted permission for Andrew’s lawyers to receive a copy of the confidential agreement between the late financier Jeffrey Epstein and Virginia Giuffre. Continue reading...

Here’s the full list of what you can and can’t do in NSW and the ACT