World news | The Guardian

If just one in two new Liberal-National MPs are women, it could take until next century, according to the McKell InstituteIt could take more than two decades for Australia’s House of Representatives to reach gender parity, even if women win two in every three seats gained by the Coalition in the next few elections, according to new modelling.The modelling by the McKell Institute, a progressive thinktank, indicates the growing momentum for quotas to increase the Liberal party’s share of female candidates won’t be a silver bullet for equal representation of women and men in the lower house. Continue reading...

Analysis: Brexit terms and handling of funeral seen as latest in a litany of perceived or real concessionsA Sinn Féin funeral was the spark but loyalists in Northern Ireland have been throwing petrol bombs and burning cars partly because they fear political marginalisation.The union flag no longer flutters daily over Belfast city hall, a trade border separates the region from the rest of the UK and the police are allegedly beholden to Sinn Féin. Add to this a criminal gang’s resentment at recent arrests and you have the context for three consecutive nights of rioting in several towns that have left dozens of police officers injured, including five on Sunday night. Continue reading...

Death toll may rise further after torrential rain swept Indonesian archipelago and neighbouring Timor-LesteAt least 97 people been killed and dozens are missing following tropical cyclone Seroja, which triggered devastating flash floods and landslides across eastern Indonesia and neighbouring Timor-Leste on Sunday.Strong winds and torrential overnight rains caused dams to overflow and submerged villages, forcing thousands of people to flee to evacuation shelters. Continue reading...

Frustration grows over patchwork arrangements across the country as infections rates continue to rise

He was hailed as the new Nick Drake, but addiction nearly destroyed him. Now he writes songs ‘in a state of joy’ and, after stacking shelves for minimum wage, has released his best work yetSpeaking on a video call from Massachusetts, Ryley Walker is obscured by a blaze of sunlight coming through a large open window as he filters out the air in his apartment. “I must give up smoking,” the singer-songwriter frowns, lighting up his third cigarette.Given how much Walker has had to give up over the last few years – emerging from the drug and alcohol dependency that shaped his adult life – it’s hard to begrudge him one last remaining vice. Walker, who attempted suicide as a consequence of his addictions, says that being here today is “a miracle”. His career-best new album – the proggy, unexpectedly pretty Course in Fable – is the sound of an artist treating his life as such. Continue reading...

Former head of local news website tells judges he was instructed to skew coverage to favour PM and his familyBenjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to remain in power face a double-pronged challenge, with Israel’s prime minister back in a Jerusalem courtroom for his corruption trial while at the same time critical talks on his political future were held following last month’s inconclusive election.The witness testimony and evidence stage of a case assessing whether the 71-year-old leader is guilty of bribery, fraud and breach of trust – repeatedly delayed by the pandemic – began on Monday morning. Continue reading...

Doctors say details on strategy are lacking – a lack of clarity that has characterized the authoritarian leader’s pandemic responseThe first person in Nicaragua to receive a coronavirus vaccine was Marco Antonio Aráuz, 62, who was given a dose of the Russian Sputnik V treatment at Managua’s Blue Cross hospital.Related: Nicaragua leaders face backlash after forming space agency amid human rights crisis Continue reading...

Rights groups warn that children across the world are being pushed into abusive situations, from early marriage to child labourAcross the world 800 million children are still not fully back in school, Unicef is warning, with many at risk of never returning to the classroom the longer closures go on. There are at least 90 countries where schools are either closed or offering a mix of remote and in-person learning.The UN agency’s chief of education, Robert Jenkins, told the Guardian that the closures are part of “unimaginable” disruption to children’s education. Continue reading...

Liberal senator asks for privacy as he undertakes further testing to confirm prognosis and commence treatmentThe Liberal senator Jim Molan has announced he has an “aggressive form of cancer” and will be taking leave from parliament immediately to begin treatment.In a message to colleagues and on his public Facebook page on Monday, Molan asked for privacy as he undertook further testing to confirm the prognosis and to commence treatment. Continue reading...

The village of Fadiouth lies on an island of clam shells, with a footbridge connecting it to mainland Senegal. Senegal as a whole in majority Muslim, but on the island of Fadiouth the population is around 90% Christian Continue reading...

Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced the end of a snap lockdown in response to the Brisbane Covid outbreak, but some coronavirus restrictions were expanded to the entire state in time for the Easter public holiday long weekend. Here’s what you need to know

Decades of persecution has left the Shia minority with little space left in its graveyards but prime minister Imran Khan is in no hurry to listenAhmed Shah had always dreamed of bigger things. Though just 17, the high school pupil had taken a job in the coalmines of Balochistan, Pakistan’s south-western province, one of the harshest, most dangerous working environments in the world. Shah was determined to earn enough to educate himself, so he could escape the tough life of the Hazara Shia community, the most persecuted minority in Pakistan.Related: In Pakistan, tolerant Islamic voices are being silenced | William Dalrymple Continue reading...

Has your daily walk become an endless trudge to nowhere? These podcasts, chosen by comedians, podcasters, Guardian writers and readers, are guaranteed to bring a smile to your face

Back with a political reworking of Can You Feel It, brothers Tito, Marlon and Jackie talk about their legendarily tough father, their memories of Michael and why they always hope for another massive hitCan You Feel It is one of the great disco songs. Now the Jacksons are determined to remind us that it is also one of the great political songs, with its call for “all the colours of the world” to unite and tell the “marching men who are killing their brothers” that we all share the same blood.Forty years after first charting, Can You Feel It has been reworked to include clips from speeches by Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, part of a project to expand the band’s six albums for Epic with remixes and bonus tracks. It makes perfect sense to have MLK and Obama guesting on the song, Tito Jackson says today: “They are the two best rappers in the world.” Tito and Jackie, the oldest brother, laugh. They are Zooming from Las Vegas, where they both live. Both are youthful and run off high-energy batteries. Tito, whose three sons make up the group 3T, is wearing his customary bowler hat – he says it’s the first thing he puts on when he gets up, and the last thing he takes off at night. Jackie, who has been married three times and has four children, is smartly dressed and smiley. It’s hard to believe they are approaching 70. Continue reading...

Easing of measures announced as Queensland celebrates an Easter tourism surgeA mask mandate and other snap coronavirus restrictions will be lifted across northern New South Wales after the fourth day of no community transmission.About 200,000 residents in the region have been required to wear masks in most indoor public areas and limit house gatherings to no more than 30 since Wednesday. Continue reading...

Actors of color sweep awards for first time at pre-recorded event, as cast of Aaron Sorkin’s 1960s courtroom drama win best ensemble

India has the world’s third-highest number of cases after the US and BrazilIndia recorded 103,558 new Covid cases on Monday, its biggest ever one-day figure, data from the health ministry showed – taking the national total to 12.59 million cases.

Women are challenging largely male political class as fears grow ‘dinosaurs’ of Libyan politics will try to cling on to powerLibyan civil activists led by an increasingly assertive group of women are demanding their country’s largely male political class stick to their commitment to hold parliamentary and presidential elections on 24 December, the 70th anniversary of Libya’s independence.The interim government of Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, which was made possible by a ceasefire sealed in October, was sworn in on 15 March. Continue reading...

In mandatory Covid isolation, art director David Marriott is making the most of his design skills – and lifting morale at the same timeTen days into his fortnight of mandatory quarantine in a Brisbane hotel, David Marriott sits in his room caressing the mane of his horse, Russell, as he looks out on the overcast city.A used poke bowl sits on Marriott’s head, in the style of a cowboy hat. He’s also wearing a vest and chaps – attire he fashioned out of the brown paper bags that carried the meals dropped at his door. Continue reading...

Former deputy PM’s comments come after Andrew Laming forced to have training following complaints about his behaviour towards womenThe Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce has cast doubt on government-ordered empathy training, saying you can’t “redesign people’s brains” to learn an “innate” skill.The former deputy prime minister has also questioned whether parliament’s hostile environment is conducive to empathetic behaviour, saying it is a more “difficult” workplace than that of the corporate world. Continue reading...

Maintenance worker issues tearful apology as investigations continue into what caused vehicle to slide down embankmentA maintenance worker whose runaway truck sparked Taiwan’s worst rail disaster in recent decades made a tearful apology on Sunday as investigators said the train driver had little time to react to the collision.At least 50 people were killed and more than 200 were injured in Friday’s crash, which sent a packed eight-carriage train hurtling into the sides of a narrow tunnel near the eastern coastal city of Hualien. Continue reading...

Christa Avery and Matthew O’Kane are on their way home home after being released without chargeAn Australian couple have been freed from house arrest in Myanmar and allowed to leave the country without charge, one of the two business consultants said on Sunday.Christa Avery and her husband, Matthew O’Kane, were refused permission to leave Myanmar last month when they were about to board a flight home. Continue reading...

BMW is understood to have been involved in a collision with another car in Brownhills, West MidlandsA two-week-old baby boy has died after his pram was hit by a car on the pavement.West Midlands police said they believed a BMW had been in a collision with another car in Brownhills area before hitting the pram at about 4pm on Easter Sunday. Continue reading...

Party says rules should be widened to include ‘in-house’ roles such as that carried out by David CameronThe law must be changed to prevent the type of lobbying undertaken by David Cameron on behalf of the financier Lex Greensill, Labour has argued, after more details emerged about the extent of Greensill’s influence inside Cameron’s government.Only external lobbyists who deal with the government are required to be on a formal industry register, and not so-called “in-house” lobbyists like Cameron, who took an advocacy role for Greensill Capital after leaving Downing Street. Continue reading...

Abiy Ahmed had previously declared operations against insurgents a rapid and decisive successEthiopian military forces are now fighting a “difficult and tiresome” guerrilla war in the northern Tigray region, prime minister Abiy Ahmed has admitted.His comments mark a sharp break with previous insistence that military operations launched in November had been a rapid and decisive success. Continue reading...

The mood in the South Australian city one of cautious optimism – ‘for the first time in many years, the steelworks is in the black’Whyalla is a manufacturing town, a place of hi-vis vests, of old-school manufacturing grunt. A city where, from some angles, the steelworks dominate the skyline.There’s a new and spectacular circular jetty that everyone wants you to see, and big plans to develop the foreshore, which slopes to a glittering sea. Continue reading...

Buildings covered in plants do more than just make the cityscape attractive – they contribute to human wellbeing and action on climate changeOur cities are dominated by glass-faced edifices that overheat like greenhouses then guzzle energy to cool down. Instead, we could have buildings that are intimately connected to the living systems that have evolved with us, that celebrate the human-nature connection that is central to our wellbeing.As more of us in Australia live in urban areas and our cities grow, bringing nature into our cities is a key part of establishing and rebuilding that connection. As well as bringing beauty into urban environments, we know that people are healthier when they are connected to nature. Research also shows that crime rates decrease in areas with street trees and that property values increase. Continue reading...

West Midlands police confirm animals put down after attacking Lucille DownerTwo dogs have been “humanely destroyed” after killing an 85-year-old woman in a sustained garden attack.Lucille Downer received multiple injuries in the incident on Friday afternoon in Rowley Regis and was pronounced dead shortly after the arrival of emergency services. Her family said they would “miss her dearly”. Continue reading...

Opponents of military rule hand out eggs bearing protest messages as death toll from turmoil reaches 557Opponents of military rule in Myanmar inscribed messages of protest on Easter eggs on Sunday while thousands of others were back on the streets denouncing February’s coup and facing off with the security forces, who shot and killed at least three men.In the latest in a series of impromptu shows of defiance, messages including “Spring revolution”, “We must win” and “Get out MAH” – referring to the junta’s leader, Gen Min Aung Hlaing – were written on eggs. Continue reading...

Report shows government was considering plan months before ministers went public

Ten years after the indignados took to the streets, the fortunes of their political heirs are flaggingSpain’s regional elections in May 2011 were a lively affair, to say the least. As post-crash austerity led to soaring unemployment and abject poverty for millions, the indignados movement was born, filling Madrid and other cities with protesters night after night. It was out of this ferment of discontent and anti-capitalist idealism that the Podemos party was born, quickly rivalling and briefly threatening to surpass the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party as the country’s main leftwing force.Ten years on, political drama is on the cards again, as Madrid goes to the polls on 4 May. The conservative regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has called a snap election to consolidate her majority, after threatening manoeuvres from a junior coalition partner. Podemos’s leader, Pablo Iglesias, has stepped down from his role as a deputy prime minister in Spain’s socialist-led government to take her on. The Madrid region has been run by the right since 1995, so Mr Iglesias has his work cut out. He has suggested his candidacy is motivated by a need to head off a possible extreme-right administration in the capital, which could include the far-right Vox party. But there are almost certainly other considerations at work as well. Continue reading...

Mercury expected to drop to -7C in some parts of the country overnight, with snow showers possibleTemperatures are expected to plummet to -7C (19.4F) in some parts of the UK overnight as Arctic winds bring an end to the good weather.The drastic change will see forecast highs of 17C in southern England on Easter Sunday drop to just 2C on Monday morning. Continue reading...

Deputy PM says authorities intercepted communications between prince and foreign partiesA senior Jordanian official has claimed authorities foiled a “malicious plot” at the “zero hour”, as a new round of arrests reached the closest aide to Prince Hamzah, the royal alleged to have unsuccessfully conspired to oust his half-brother, King Abdullah, in a weekend coup.The foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Ayman Safadi, said on Sunday that the country’s intelligence services had intercepted a plot as it was about to be carried out. He offered scant details but said Hamzah had liaised with a foreign government to destabilise the kingdom. Continue reading...

The town in the shadow of Gatwick airport hopes the worst of the pandemic is over but fears for its jobs

Polish poet and leading voice of its Generation of ’68, who wrote ‘to understand the world’The poet Adam Zagajewski, who has died aged 75, was one of the leading voices of Poland’s Nowa Fala (new wave), also known as the Generation of ’68 – a loose group of poets who opposed the corruption of language imposed by communism and promoted the simplicity and honesty of their native tongue. Like many of his generation, informed by the horrors of the second world war, Zagajewski became focused on poetry’s ethical obligations in understanding and presenting the world to the reader “after Auschwitz”.In 1974, together with the poet and critic Julian Kornhauser, Zagajewski published a manifesto in the form of a collection of essays on Polish literature, The Unrepresented World, that demanded “non-naive realism” (Kornhauser’s term) in fiction: realism understood not as a literary movement but rather as an obligation to describe social reality in communist Poland, which put them in conflict with the authorities. Along with this mission to provide “the basic source of information about the world and its people”, Zagajewski also pondered on the concept of liberty, as in his poem Freedom, translated by Antony Graham: Continue reading...

Evidence Joel implores public to remain vigilant as search for Oxford Brookes student continuesThe mother of the missing student Richard Okorogheye spoke of the “hell” of still waiting for news two weeks after he disappeared, with each passing day becoming harder to bear.Okorogheye, 19, who has sickle cell disease, has not made contact with his family since leaving home in Ladbroke Grove, west London, at about 8.30pm on Monday, 22 March. Continue reading...

Former owner of Adidas and his wife attacked during raid in Combs-la-Ville near ParisThe former French minister and scandal-ridden tycoon Bernard Tapie, once the owner of Adidas, was attacked along with his wife during a night-time burglary of their home, police have said.The couple were asleep when four men broke into the house in Combs-la-Ville near Paris around 12.30am local time on Sunday, beat them and tied them up with electrical cords before making off with stolen goods. Continue reading...

Farmed salmon can end up deformed, blind, riddled with sea lice and driven to eat each other. Eco art activists Cooking Sections are highlighting their plight – and getting Tate to change its menusA few months back, a book arrived in the post – tiny, not much larger than a bank card. Though the cover was grey, its pages were a riot of pinks, from deepest persimmon to pale rose. Printed on them were dense, technical essays referencing everything from fish farming to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The title was Salmon: A Red Herring.Fish is an unexpected topic for an art book – but then the duo who created this little volume, Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, aren’t really going for the coffee-table market. Operating under the name Cooking Sections, the pair have a thing for food. Their art is about what we eat and its impact on the Earth. Continue reading...

But Not Maternity Alliance says postcode lottery remains despite guidance issued in December

Area around Fuendetodos will recreate artists’ Black Paintings venue as it marks his 275th birthdayTwo hundred years after he covered the walls of his house near Madrid with febrile visions of Saturn devouring his son, a witches’ sabbath and a slowly drowning dog, Francisco de Goya has been summoned home to help reverse the fortunes of the poor, remote and underpopulated Spanish region where he was born in 1746.The painter, printmaker and fascinated, appalled chronicler of war, cruelty and reason’s frequent slumbers, studied in Italy and painted for the court in Madrid before dying in Bordeaux in 1828. But he was born on the other side of the Pyrenees in Fuendetodos, a small town 27 miles (44km) south of Zaragoza in the north-eastern Spanish region of Aragon. Continue reading...

Authorities also arrested two aides after raiding King Abdullah’s half-brother’s palace in capital Amman

Francis also calls for distribution of Covid-19 vaccines to be sped up, particularly to the world’s poor

Canada’s most populous province has been warning of rapidly spreading coronavirus variants, as cases and ICU admissions surgedLisa Salamon-Switzman, an emergency room doctor in Toronto, had already worked through two deadly surges of the coronavirus pandemic when a new batch of patients recently began arriving that left her unsettled because of their low oxygen levels – and their age.“They’re younger than what we saw earlier and they don’t really understand how sick they are,” she said of patients who are in their 40s and 50s. “And now it’s become this huge, huge wave.” Continue reading...

As decades-old battle intensifies, civilians count cost in lives and livelihoods

Exclusive: call for coordinated effort by African and western countries to stop crisis spiralling out of controlThe growing Islamist insurgency in north Mozambique can only be halted with a coordinated military and development effort involving African and western countries or it risks spiralling further out of control, experts have warned.They argue that the raid on the port town of Palma last month by the Islamic State-affiliated local al-Shabaab group, which left dozens killed and thousands displaced, marks a watershed moment in the escalating four-year conflict. Continue reading...

Police broke up a Good Friday service at a Polish church in London after officers said it was violating English coronavirus regulations. People were worshipping at Christ the King church in the south of the capital when police arrived following reports of queues outside the building. The service was being streamed live on social media and footage showed officers addressing those in attendance, telling them the gathering was unlawful. The church defended the service, arguing regulations had been met

The half-brother of Jordan’s King Abdullah said on Saturday that he had been placed under house arrest and accused the country’s leadership of corruption and incompetence. Prince Hamzah bin Hussein said in a video statement that the country’s military chief had visited him and told he was not allowed to go out, meet other people or communicate with them. He said his security detail had been removed and his phone and internet service cut

Every one of the UK’s 150,000 victims will be represented on the National Covid Memorial Wall by the Thames

Former NSW State of Origin representative had to be restrained after becoming aggressive, police saidWomen’s rugby league star Nita Maynard has been charged after allegedly assaulting two security guards at a Sydney hotel.The former NSW State of Origin representative was arrested after being asked to leave Cronulla’s Northies hotel on Friday night. Continue reading...

Internal report reveals risk to migrant rough sleepers in crackdownThe Home Office has admitted that a new immigration rule to criminalise and deport migrant rough sleepers may discriminate against ethnic minorities, including Asian women who have survived domestic violence.An internal document outlines the department’s analysis of how the new power – which prompted widespread outrage when it came into force four months ago – would also indirectly affect at-risk groups, including people with disabilities. Continue reading...