Move seen as a symbolic protest against discriminatory policies promoted in Poland and HungaryMEPs have voted to declare the EU an “LGBTIQ freedom zone” in a symbolic protest against discriminatory policies promoted in Poland and Hungary where regions have set themselves against the “ideology” of equality.Two years after the first local authority in Poland declared itself an ‘‘LGBTIQ-free zone”, the European parliament adopted its resolution by 492 votes in favour, 141 against and 46 abstentions. Continue reading...

Police officer arrested on suspicion of murder over disappearance of 33-year-old hospitalised with head injury while in custodyPolice scrambled to reassure the public after an officer from an elite unit was arrested for the alleged kidnap and murder of a woman who vanished on her way home, and investigators searching for her found human remains.Hope faded in the search for Sarah Everard, 33, after the Metropolitan police commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, announced that police had made the discovery in woodland in Kent. Continue reading...

Covid vaccination policy review urged after study finds 12-week gap leaves patients vulnerable

Transparency International says a fundamental failing of the draft legislation is its differing treatment of politicians and law enforcementThe federal government’s draft anti-corruption commission legislation lacks any credibility, and would create a weak, ineffective body that would actually degrade part of Australia’s existing integrity framework, Transparency International has warned.The government is currently consulting with key stakeholders on draft legislation for its proposed Commonwealth Integrity Commission, after years of delay and missed deadlines. Continue reading...

Human Rights Watch says its research has found there is ‘a very deep fear of being watched, of being reported on’Chinese students in Australia are afraid to speak out on politically sensitive issues because of potential repercussions for relatives back home, a parliamentary inquiry has been told.Human Rights Watch has said its ongoing research into academic freedom in Australia had found anxiety and loneliness among Chinese students, with some engaging in self-censorship to avoid a backlash from Beijing. Continue reading...

From the Godfathers of Arabic rap to the father of Ethio-jazz, Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan guides a tour through global music’s greatest

Denmark, Norway and Iceland suspend jabs while Italy and other countries hold off one batch

Final vote due on Thursday after move to add sex to list of protected characteristics is turned downScotland’s controversial hate crime bill is set to pass later on Thursday amid anger about its current exclusion of women and assurances that the legislation will not criminalise those whose views are considered by some to be transphobic.Leading the final debate in the Scottish parliament on Thursday, Scotland’s justice secretary, Humza Yousaf, assured MSPs that the legislation balanced protections for victims of hate crime with safeguarding freedom of expression, stating that the rigorous consideration of the bill had “shown the very best of parliament”. Continue reading...

Politicians and Olympics chief back Lara Lugli, who was fired and is now being sued after requesting back payAn Italian volleyball player who is being sued by her club for allegedly breaking her contract after becoming pregnant said she was being treated as if she had done something “illicit and malicious”.In a case that has provoked outrage among politicians and sports chiefs, Volley Maniago Pordenone claimed Lara Lugli, 41, failed to tell them she was planning to have a baby when she signed a contract to play for the club during the 2018-19 volleyball season. Continue reading...

Jab has 97% efficacy against disease and death and 94% against infection without symptomsThe Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine appears to give high protection against asymptomatic Covid-19, according to data from Israel – a finding that will boost hopes that mass vaccination can stop the spread of the virus.The top line of the real-world results, issued by the Israeli ministry of health and the companies but not yet peer-reviewed by scientists, is efficacy of 97% against disease and death and 94% against infection without symptoms. Continue reading...

The award-winning biopic of Jake LaMotta was released 40 years ago. With these exclusive images, Jay Glennie, who interviewed the cast and crew for a new book, reveals secrets of the film’s shoot

Report on UK country houses with historic links to colonialism and slavery had set off ‘culture war’The National Trust did not breach charity law by publishing a report that found itself at the centre of a “culture war” after it made links between its country house properties and the UK’s history of colonialism and slavery, the charity regulator has ruled.In effect exonerating the trust of claims that it had acted outside of its charitable purposes, the Charity Commission confirmed that the trust had acted legally and responsibly at all times and would face no regulatory action. Continue reading...

British-drafted UN statement watered down by China, Russia and India while military accuses Aung San Suu Kyi of taking bribesThe United Nations has condemned the Myanmar military’s violent crackdown against anti-coup demonstrators as eight more people were reported shot dead in protests and a military spokesman accused deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi of taking bribes.The claims that she had illegally accepted payments worth $600,000 plus gold were strongly rejected by members of her National League for Democracy, one of whom, former MP Aye Ma Ma Myo, told Reuters: “It is no longer uncommon to see slander against politicians and efforts to crush the party while innocent young people are killed in public.” Continue reading...

After years of slogging through DJ sets, bodybuilding and reality TV, the London producer had one of 2020’s biggest and best pop hits. But his brutal work ethic is ‘a gift and a curse’Amid the draining gloom of pandemic life, Joel Corry has been a soothing constant: if you have turned on the radio at any time in the past year, there is a huge chance that one of the British pop-house producer’s three big singles will have been playing. Sorry, Lonely and Head & Heart (the latter a six-week chart topper) have collectively earned more than a billion streams and made Corry into one of the UK’s biggest new pop stars, a Calvin Harris type who has guest vocalists out front while he prods equipment and points gunfingers skyward. Sorry got a boost from being used on Love Island in 2018, and his music is rather like the Love Island of pop: buoyant, cheesy, suffused with romantic drama and sparkling sunlight. But when talking to him in his hotel room, clouds gather.Corry could actually be a Love Island contestant: he has the good looks and earnest kindly nature of a 90s boyband heartthrob, as well as the abdominals, which look not so much chiselled as 3D-printed following a successful earlier career as a bodybuilder. In fact, he has reality TV pedigree as a rare southern interloper amid the cast of MTV’s lairy Geordie Shore; he was the boyfriend of the show’s charismatic bad-influencer Sophie Kasaei, with whom he had a six-year relationship until 2017. Continue reading...

Duke of Cambridge defends monarchy after accusations of racism from Harry and Meghan

Newman, a successful pop songwriter for Rudimental, Calvin Harris and others, returns after missing out on 2020’s cancelled eventThe UK’s entry to the 2021 Eurovision song contest has been revealed: a high-energy dance-pop track by James Newman, entitled Embers.Newman was due to perform for the UK at 2020’s event, before it was cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic. His song My Last Breath hasn’t been carried over to the 2021 event. Continue reading...

Milestone ruling follows campaign for justice after township violence in wake of 2019 presidential electionsThe supreme court of Malawi has ordered that police authorities pay compensation to 18 women allegedly raped by officers during post-election violence two years ago.The decision is seen as a milestone development in women’s rights in the country. Continue reading...

The Duke of Cambridge has defended the monarchy against accusations of racism made by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, saying: 'We’re very much not a racist family.'William said he had not yet spoken to his brother, but said 'I will do', following Harry and Meghan's interview with Oprah Winfey in which they made claims of bigotry and a lack of support

Dutch engineer was also instrumental in development of first CD in his work at PhilipsLou Ottens, the Dutch engineer credited with inventing the cassette tape and playing a major role in the development of the first CD, has died aged 94 at his home in the village of Duizel in North Brabant.As product development manager at Philips, Ottens twice revolutionised the world of music but remained modest to the end. “We were little boys who had fun playing,” he said. “We didn’t feel like we were doing anything big. It was a kind of sport.” Continue reading...

Why let a little thing like remote working keep you from creating a buffer between work and personal time?At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, some workers found themselves at home, momentarily (at least they thought) liberated from the many impositions of office work – including commuting. Now, instead of waking up early, getting dressed and schlepping to the office and back, people had time to do anything they want. Which is why it might be surprising that some are still pretending to commute.Related: Out of office: what the homeworking revolution means for our cities Continue reading...

Shadow minister Jess Phillips spoke out following suspected abduction of Sarah EverardViolence against women is an epidemic which requires far more attention and resources, Labour’s shadow minister for domestic violence, Jess Phillips, has said, in the wake of the disappearance of Sarah Everard, who police believe may have been abducted as she walked home in south London.Phillips, who will speak at parliament’s International Women’s Day debate on Thursday when she will read out the names of all the women murdered by men in the past year, said it was untrue to say that the killing of women was rare. Continue reading...

Activists say EU should refuse to sign treaty until national security laws and election restrictions are liftedHong Kong democracy activists have warned the EU it must not ratify its planned new investment deal with China at a time when Beijing is tearing up international obligations to the people of Hong Kong.The 24 activists – including 13 in exile – have written to the EU commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, to call for the EU to refuse to sign the treaty until China’s national security laws are repealed and restrictions on who can stand for election are lifted. Continue reading...

An initial list of 13 destinations for the half-price flights has been released, but the government says more locations could be addedAustralians will be able to access half-priced flights to a handful of regional tourist destinations after the government announced it would subsidise certain routes as part of a $1.2bn support package for the tourism sector ravaged by state and international border closures.While the prime minister, Scott Morrison, labelled the airfare initiative – which includes subsidising 800,000 domestic airfares – a “ticket to recovery”, tourism and hospitality leaders have criticised the package for only targeting aviation businesses. They have warned it won’t do enough to save jobs after the jobseeker wage subsidy is cut off at the end of March. Continue reading...

People in court’s public gallery break down as verdicts delivered at drugs-related trial involving victims being put in toolbox and dumped in lagoonA jury has taken just two hours to convict four men for the “breathtakingly evil” deaths of two people whose bodies were found in a toolbox submerged in a Queensland lagoon.The verdict was delivered to a packed supreme court in Brisbane on Thursday with members of the gallery breaking down as the four men were found guilty. Continue reading...

UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab accuses Beijing of hollowing out the space for democratic debateChina’s rubber stamping parliamentary body has unanimously – bar one abstention and to sustained and loud applause – approved new laws ensuring that only people it deems “patriots” can govern Hong Kong, in a move critics say signals the end of the city’s remaining autonomy.The final meeting of the National People’s Congress (NPC) at the annual “two sessions” political gathering also approved new domestic amendments and budgets, and the 14th five-year-plan, intended to strengthen and expand China’s domestic technology industry and market, and reach new GDP and population targets amid economic uncertainty and declining birth rates. Continue reading...

Brexit red tape and disruption to global trade from pandemic leaves businesses ‘severely strained’Three-quarters of British manufacturers are struggling to cope with delays in moving goods in and out of the EU amid continuing disruption caused by Brexit and the Covid pandemic, industry figures said.Two months after the UK left the EU on trade terms agreed by Boris Johnson’s government, research from the manufacturing trade group Make UK has shown that 74% of firms in a survey of more than 200 leading industrial companies are facing delays with EU imports and exports. Continue reading...

There is absurdist carnage as a journalist takes bloody real-life revenge on the keyboard warriors tormenting herTo paraphrase Nietzsche: gaze too long into Twitter, and Twitter will gaze into you. Anyone who writes for a living on the internet has surely fantasised about payback time for all the keyboard warriors, callous below-the-liners and unrepentant trolls out there. Ivo van Aart’s movie gives full rein to that desire and is snappily directed – but in the end there is something self-satisfied and sententious about his feminist revenge flick.Katja Herbers plays Femke Boot, a newspaper columnist drowning in internet misogyny, especially after she steps out of her usual lifestyle remit to write an op-ed about Zwarte Piet, the Dutch blackface folkloric character. Her book publisher is pressurising her for juicier material to better compete with author-of-the-hour Steven Dood (Steven Death), a kohl-rimmed provocateur who savages her on a chatshow. Umbilically fed by her phone on a diet of shitposter abuse, she finally snaps when she realises her neighbour – partial to some Zwarte Piet himself – is one of her tormentors. Continue reading...

Relatives of four police officers describe ‘deep and utter despair’ during Mohinder Singh’s pre-sentence hearingSharron MacKenzie’s life was reduced to an “ocean of tears and sleepless nights” after her husband was one of four Victoria Police officers killed by a drugged and delusional truck driver.Mohinder Singh, 48, has pleaded guilty to culpable driving causing the deaths while the officers were impounding a Porsche on Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway in April 2020. Continue reading...

Health department secretary says October deadline only applies to first vaccine dose. Follow the latest updates

Consent has been portrayed as the cure for all the ills of our sexual culture. But what if the injunction to ‘know what you want’ is another form of coercion?

As the George Floyd murder trial opens in Minneapolis, the city councillor talks about coming out as trans, the prejudices she has had to overcome – and how policing must changeAndrea Jenkins lives just a few blocks away from 38th and Chicago, the crossroads in Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed on 25 May last year. She spent two decades of her life working to revitalise the community there, and kicked off her 2017 campaign for the city council’s Eighth ward in an arts centre a few yards away.After Floyd’s death, when the crossroads became a space for collective mourning, Jenkins visited every day. But in the midst of a bitter Minneapolis winter and with the neighbourhood reeling from the long-term effects of Floyd’s death, Jenkins hasn’t been in months. Continue reading...

It began as a way to moan about the pandemic – or avoid childcare. Now Lockdown Parenting Hell is downloaded 2m times a month. The comedians chat fatherhood, burnout – and dreaming of the pubLike many comedians, Josh Widdicombe and Rob Beckett found themselves without an outlet when the pandemic struck. And so, like many comedians, they decided to make a podcast. Theirs – Lockdown Parenting Hell – has become one of the most popular in the country, mining the stresses of everything from twins, tantrums and building a trampoline to the tune of more than 15m downloads.Beckett has two young children with his wife, Louise Watts, while Widdicome and his wife, Rose Hanson, have one, with another on the way. Each week, the pair interview a celebrity (past guests have included Michael Sheen, Philippa Perry and Paddy McGuinness) while sharing stories about their upended domestic lives. It is fast, fun and, at times, genuinely touching. Here, they share their thoughts on their pandemic pastime. Continue reading...

1856 guide offers insight into era’s thinking, including how spring weather would affect future harvestsThe Victorians did not have much idea what caused weather patterns but they knew what effect they had on their welfare.Enquire Within Upon Everything, “the indispensable guide to living”, published in 1856, poses many important questions and provides answers. Among the topics is spring weather and the effect it will have on future harvests. For example: what is the use of March winds? “They dry the soil, (which is saturated by the floods of February) break up the heavy clods, and fit the land for the seeds which are committed to it.” Continue reading...

The scale of destruction from a series of explosions in Equatorial Guinea's port city Bata has been revealed in new satellite and drone images. Blasts tore through a military base of 7 March, killing over 100 people and injuring more than 600. The images show rows of flattened buildings and areas populated with trees destroyed by the explosions. Continue reading...

Facilities holding those recently detained are becoming congested, justice minister saysThailand is considering an expansion of prison space as it arrests more political prisoners, the justice minister has said.Somsak Thepsuthin said Bangkok Remand Prison and Klong Prem Central Prison, where most recently detained political prisoners are held, become congested when families and supporters come to visit. Continue reading...

Human remains have been found in woodland by officers searching for Sarah Everard, London police chief Cressida Dick said on Wednesday evening. Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive, went missing after leaving a friend’s house in Clapham, south London, at about 9pm last Wednesday. A Met officer has been arrested on suspicion of her murder

Big majority in EU parliament vote for corporate due diligence along entire supply chains, which will include UK businessesThe EU took a step closer to holding companies to account for environmental damage and human rights abuses committed by their subsidiaries and suppliers overseas, with a vote in the European parliament on Wednesday.MEPs voted by a large majority, 504 to 79 (with 112 abstentions), to push forward with proposed legislation that would require companies to conduct due diligence throughout their supply chain, to root out abuses and environmental harm such as deforestation and pollution. Continue reading...

Chun Xu, 31, will appear in court on Thursday over incident in Treorchy last weekChun Xu, 31 has been charged with the the murder of 16-year-old Wenjing Lin in Treorchy on Friday, South Wales police said.He will appear before Merthyr Tydfil magistrates court on Thursday. Continue reading...

Thursday: the AMA casts doubt on plan to vaccinate all Australians by October. Plus: will 17-year-old Joseph Suaalii make his first-grade NRL debut?Ructions at Buckingham Palace fuel republican movements, Australia’s vaccine timeline is disputed, and Congress has passed a record emergency package. Those are the lead stories, this Thursday 11 March.The Australian Medical Association has contradicted the federal government’s claims that its Covid-19 vaccination targets are “on track”, suggesting that the “very ambitious” goal of having all Australians vaccinated by October should be revised until the end of the year. Only 106,000 of the 1.4m doses of vaccine set aside for phase 1A have been administered since 21 February, with Labor suggesting double that number would need to be administered, daily, to reach the stated target. AMA president, Omar Khorshid, confirmed that a shortage of vaccine was the major factor for rollout delays, and while Australia would be in “less of a hurry” than nations like the US or UK, a slower vaccination timeline would see Australia’s international borders remaining closed for longer. Meanwhile, vaccine supply remains a hot topic in Europe, with the EU and UK embroiled in a war of words after 9m doses left the continent bound for the breakaway member despite regional shortfalls. Continue reading...

However, operating losses rose to €107m from €78m a year beforeFood delivery group Just Eat Takeaway recorded ballooning sales – and losses – during the Covid pandemic as families shifted to dining at home.The group, formed by the £6bn merger of London-listed Just Eat and Dutch group Takeaway.com last year, said sales soared 54% in 2020 but operating losses mounted to €107m (£92m) from €78m a year before. Continue reading...

Social media deluged about how women feel unsafe in public in the wake of missing 33-year-old

Man named as Harry S accused of aiding and abetting murder at Stutthof camp in 1944-1945A German court has halted proceedings against a 96-year-old former Nazi camp guard deemed unfit to stand trial, but ruled that he must pay his own legal fees.The man named as Harry S is accused of aiding and abetting murder in several hundred cases while working as a guard at the Stutthof camp near what was Danzig, now Gdańsk, between June 1944 and May 1945. Continue reading...

‘This was the place where we would all go drinking. In the days after, people arrived from all over Lebanon with brushes and cleaned up, street by streetLiving in conflict zones teaches you about bomb blasts. After spending years in Kabul, I learned how to estimate how far away an explosion is. When a car bomb detonates, you’ll hear the explosion, but you won’t feel the shockwave unless you’re pretty close. But what happened in Beirut on 4 August 2020 was like nothing I had ever experienced.I live in west Beirut, some four kilometres away from the port where thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded after a fire in the warehouse it had been stored in. Despite the distance, my whole building shook. Glass blown out of windows littered the streets. I assumed the blast was maybe two blocks away, it was only when I went on to the street and saw the distant plumes of smoke behind the skyline buildings that I realised quite how far away it was. Continue reading...

Adverts in New York Times, Washington Post and other US papers seek to rally Irish-American supportA US-based Sinn Féin support group has placed half-page advertisements in the New York Times, Washington Post and other US newspapers calling for a referendum on Irish unification.Friends of Sinn Féin placed the ads on Wednesday to rally Irish-American support behind the party’s push for a referendum in Northern Ireland. Continue reading...

Monarch criticised for treating claims by Meghan and Harry as ‘private’ family matterThe Queen missed a crucial opportunity to publicly acknowledge and condemn racism in her response to the allegations made by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, equality campaigners have claimed.Casting the issue as a “private” family matter meant there was “no public accountability” from a public institution and the head of state and Commonwealth, they said. Continue reading...

We asked UK and European readers to send in photos of the natural world near them from the last few weeks

What’s the most common transgression people feel guilty about? Sex, of course. Now, in a controversial new French book, Catholic clergymen unveil some surprising intimate detailsName: Confession.Age: 1,000 years old. Continue reading...