Beijing formally confirmed death to UN but man’s daughter disputes suggestion he died of ‘pneumonia and tuberculosis’ in 2018The Chinese government has taken the rare step of formally confirming to the UN the death of a Uighur man whose family believe had been held in a Xinjiang internment camp since 2017.More than one million people from the Uighur and Turkic Muslim communities in the far western region of Xinjiang are believed to have been detained in camps since 2017, under a crackdown on ethnic minorities which experts say amounts to cultural genocide. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has repeatedly refused requests by international bodies to independently visit and investigate the region, despite growing international backlash. Continue reading...

An invasion may not be imminent but experts say armed forces could have capacity to mount one by the end of the decadeSoon after China imposed the new national security law that effectively ended Hong Kong’s limited autonomy, a hawkish legal academic in Beijing spelt out a warning to Taiwan.The law was not just about ending a year of protests in Hong Kong, Tian Feilong said in an interview with DW News, it was also sending a message to Taipei – and to Washington, which has recently approved new arms sales and high-level visits by US officials to self-rule Taiwan. Continue reading...

The Mana Motuhake policy is a 25-year plan to improve the outcomes of whānau Māori that the mainstream major parties have failed to deliver onIn an election campaign that has so far been largely a bidding contest over who can fund the most “shovel-ready projects”, create the most jobs and support the most apprentices post-Covid, many commentators have bemoaned the absence of any visionary debate about the type of New Zealand we want to become.It was therefore refreshing to see the Māori party announce its Mana Motuhake policy this week. As far as timing goes, the policy hasn’t gained a lot of media attention. The news has been dominated by the Serious Fraud Office’s charging of two individuals in connection with the New Zealand First Foundation, a new poll and the second leaders’ debate. Many also think the Māori party is inconsequential in 2020, sitting only on 1–1.5% party vote support in public opinion polls, and not looking like they are going to win back any electorate seats. Continue reading...

Rescue boats had begun ‘gently moving’ pod of three whales towards the mouth of the River ClydeRescuers shepherded a pod of three northern bottlenose whales from a Scottish loch on Thursday before a major international military exercise.The British Divers Marine Life Rescue group said a first group of boats had begun “gently moving” the deep-diving mammals from Loch Long towards the mouth of the River Clyde. Continue reading...

A full investigation will take place following the fatal incident in YorkshireA driver has died during a British land speed record attempt.A full investigation is to take place into the circumstances of the incident at Elvington airfield to the east of York on Thursday afternoon. Continue reading...

Friday: New tax concessions are designed to get the economy moving in a Covid world. Plus: will we ever stop squeezing avocados?Good morning, this is Imogen Dewey bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 2 October. Continue reading...

Singer responds after complaint filed over photos of him without face covering on Italian island of Capri

A freeze on government wages would hit regional and female workers hardest and would be ‘deeply damaging’, a new report says

The caravan from Honduras is the biggest since the pandemic hit Central America in March, triggering a rise in unemployment and povertyThousands of Honduran migrants hoping to reach the United States have entered Guatemala, testing the newly reopened frontier that had been shut by the coronavirus pandemic.Authorities had planned to register the migrants as they crossed and offer assistance to those willing to turn back, but early on Thursday, the group pushed past armed guards without registering. By midday more than 3,000 migrants had crossed illegally, said Guatemalan officials. Continue reading...

Artist whose mother had affair with former king Albert II wins the right to use royal title and father’s surnameAn artist who successfully fought a seven-year legal battle to prove she was the daughter of the former king of Belgium, Albert II, has won the right to be recognised as a princess.The Brussels Court of Appeal has ruled that Delphine Boël, 52, had the right to her Royal father’s surname after a bitter battle for acknowledgement. Continue reading...

Rights groups and charities unite to oppose sending refugees to remote islandsHumanitarian groups and charities have reacted with fury to revelations that No 10 officials explored sending asylum seekers to offshore detention centres in Moldova, Morocco and south Atlantic islands, branding the move “morally bankrupt”.A source close to the Home Office told the Guardian that the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, had become “obsessed with the Channel crossings” in the weeks before documents on the implications of the idea were produced in mid-September. Continue reading...

Russia says two countries’ foreign ministers have found common ground after French journalists injured during shelling

Travellers arriving from Poland and Turkey must self-isolate from 4am on Saturday; Labour leader urges PM to listen to Andy Burnham

Much of Australia has a climate that allows people to enjoy the outdoors most days of the year, but tough Covid-19 restrictions have limited the use of public space. Josephine Tovey looks at what’s changing in cities and considers how governments can make public spaces safely accessible for everyoneYou can read Josephine Tovey’s column here: In Australian cities, our ‘outdoor lifestyle’ is often a lie – but we can make it true Continue reading...

Ruler of Kuwait for 14 years who was known as ‘the dean of Arab diplomacy’The emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, who has died aged 91, ruled his country for 14 years and acquired a reputation for being committed to peaceful dialogue and unity among other Gulf states known for their divisive quarrels in recent times. Discreet, mild-mannered and valuing his personal links with fellow monarchs, Sabah was known as “the dean of Arab diplomacy”.Since 2017, however, when the younger, more assertive leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates boycotted their rival Qatar, he found it increasingly hard to play the role of regional mediator, but was still credited with having forestalled potentially disastrous military action. The war in Yemen, scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, was another nightmarish situation. Continue reading...

Research is first to show vaccination helps protect against more than just pre-cancerous changes

Spry, 35, worked alongside social services in Gloucestershire to help prevent further cases like hersA woman who suffered years of physical and mental torture by her “sadistic” foster mother and went on to became a passionate advocate for abuse survivors has died aged 35.Victoria Spry, who was abused by Eunice Spry for almost 20 years, wrote and spoke about her experiences to try to help others facing the same sort of torment. She also worked alongside social services in Gloucestershire to try to help them prevent such a tragic case happening again. Continue reading...

Arrivals from Caribbean islands of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba must also quarantine

Polish divers locate Karlsruhe, which they hope holds treasure Nazis looted from RussiaPolish divers say they have found the wreck of a German second world war ship that may help solve a decades-old mystery about the whereabouts of the Amber Room, an ornate chamber that the Nazis looted from a tsarist palace in Russia.Decorated with amber and gold, the room was part of the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg. It was last seen in Königsberg, then a Baltic port city in Germany but now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Continue reading...

Save the Children predicts worst rise in child marriage rates in 25 years as a result of pandemicUp to 2.5 million more girls around the world are at risk of being forced into child marriage over the next five years as a result of the impact of Covid-19, according to a report by Save the Children.The charity predicts the worst surge in rates of child marriage in 25 years, as the pandemic has shuttered schools and pushed poor families further into destitution. Continue reading...

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle said Black History Month should not be inflammatory and pledged to ‘celebrate community’ in an interview with the Evening Standard, presenting their Next Gen Trailblazers project, launched to coincide with the UK’s Black History MonthThe couple called for an end to ‘structural racism’, saying it holds back young people of colour Continue reading...

Self-governing Spanish region warned by central government that new measures are legally binding

UK put on formal notice over internal market bill, which ministers admit breaks international lawThe EU has launched legal action against the UK after Boris Johnson failed to respond to Brussels’ demand that he drop legislation that would overwrite the withdrawal agreement and break international law.Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission president, announced that the UK had been put on formal notice over the internal market bill tabled by the prime minister last month. Continue reading...

Some advisers are gleeful about leak, believing public spat over immigration plays well for partyMigrant camps on distant islands; decommissioned ferries kitted out to process asylum seekers; floating booms in the Channel. The government’s “blue skies” plans for tackling an influx of people arriving in small boats via continental Europe have appalled human rights campaigners and sparked a briefing war.One over-excited “Whitehall source” told the Politico Playbook newsletter, which is well-read among Westminster insiders, that the leaks had come from a “rotten core of civil servants” who were “the enemy within and will be rooted out”. Continue reading...

Plan for meeting with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya comes as EU leaders try to resolve sanctions disputeAngela Merkel has announced plans to meet the Belarusian opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, as EU leaders gathering at a Brussels summit seek to untangle a dispute that has delayed sanctions against Belarus’s authoritarian government.In a speech in the Bundestag on Wednesday, the German chancellor expressed her admiration for the women protesting against the Belarusian regime. “If you see the courage of the women on display in the streets there, for a life of freedom and free of corruption, then I can only say: I admire that,” she said. Continue reading...

Rhys Hancock sentenced to minimum of 31 years for New Year’s Day killings in DerbyshireA former headteacher has been jailed for a minimum of 31 years for murdering his estranged wife and her lover on New Year’s Day.Rhys Hancock killed Helen Hancock and Martin Griffiths at the former marital home in Duffield, Derbyshire, and called police to say: “I’ve just murdered my wife in her bed.” Continue reading...

University and government watchdog drop academic and pundit Jaap KoelewijnA Dutch academic and media pundit specialising in corporate governance and integrity has lost his university and government watchdog roles after it emerged that he had knowingly gone into business with a convicted fraudster.Jaap Koelewijn, who wrote a column in a Dutch newspaper and regularly appeared on TV and radio, had hired a man named only as Michel G, who served a 10-month prison sentence for financial fraud, to work at his two investment funds under a false name. Continue reading...

The actor who terrified a generation in the 90s horror classic returns to the role for the sequel – and for a documentary looking back at the gruelling shoot on Oliver Stone’s iconic 1986 war movieTony Todd chuckles heartily. “Why in the fuck would I go to a mirror, with me in the mirror – the actor who played the role – and call out my own damn name five times?” I have just asked the dumb – but obligatory – question of whether he has ever dared utter Candyman’s fatal invocation. Todd played Daniel Robitaille, AKA the Candyman, the hook-handed, bee-spouting yet swoonsome spectre from the 1992 horror classic. “I have never waded in that water. I don’t even listen to people when they come to me and say that. I cut them off. They try it; they want to me stop them or something.”Todd is probably getting quite a bit of this right now. Candyman was already enjoying a critical revival in the last few years as Black Lives Matter and other social movements gathered headway; despite, or perhaps because of, its white director (the Englishman Bernard Rose), it was able to smuggle in a theme that was exceptional for a 90s horror film: the psychic cost of centuries of oppression of African Americans. Now, after the George Floyd protests and with a Jordan Peele-produced sequel imminent, interest in this unusually sensitive piece of Hollywood product is white-hot. Continue reading...

Announcement follows years of tax evasion scandals involving BVI shell companies

As the UK’s leading African film festivals showcase the past decade’s classics online, we pick 20 great landmarks from the continent’s dazzling movie-making historyThe film’s director, Apolline Traoré, was born in Burkina Faso and educated in the US before returning to the country of her birth and working with Idrissa Ouédraogo. Borders is her third feature, a road movie about four very different women travelling across beautifully evoked landscapes from Senegal to Nigeria, having melodramatic, shocking or comic episodes on the hot and dusty road. Continue reading...

The Industrial Relations Commission has supported the government’s plan to prioritise job creation, the NSW treasurer saysUnions will consider legal and industrial action after what they say was a “diabolical and disgraceful” decision by the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission to award a 0.3% pay rise to public sector workers.The commission made its decision on Thursday after the NSW government had pushed for a controversial 12-month freeze on public sector wages. Continue reading...

Edward Brooke-Hitching set out to curate the ultimate collection of bizarre books down the ages. He leads us around the Madman’s Library

In case that has shocked country and led to new Twitter rules, Takahiro Shiraishi assaulted and strangled victimsA 29-year-old man has pleaded guilty in a Tokyo court to all charges related to killing and dismembering eight young women and one man in 2017, in a case that has shocked the country.Takahiro Shiraishi told the court he had contacted women via Twitter and other social media platforms who had expressed suicidal thoughts. He then took them to his apartment in Zama, about 40km (25 miles) south-west of Tokyo, where he sexually assaulted them, robbed some and strangled them. Continue reading...

The billionaire’s one-time right-hand man says he was unaware of China’s crackdown on soliciting gamblers before Crown staff were arrestedJohn Alexander was a close friend of the billionaire James Packer, and his right-hand man on the Crown Resorts board, but he was unable to tell the New South Wales casino inquiry on Thursday why Packer left the board.Packer stepped down as chairman in August 2015 and briefly became a director before leaving altogether by the end of that year. He returned briefly in 2017 as a director when Alexander took over as executive chairman. Continue reading...

More than 2 million people will be banned mixing with other households indoors in latest local lockdown

Pro-independence speaker of regional parliament laments disunity and failure to speak to all of societyThe pro-independence speaker of Catalonia’s parliament has admitted that internal disunity and a failure to engage with all of Catalan society has hampered the secessionist cause, but believes separatist MPs could for the first time clinch more than 50% of the vote in the looming regional election.The wealthy region in north-east Spain is likely to hold a snap election early next year after its separatist president, Quim Torra, was barred from public office by the supreme court. Continue reading...

Stipe ‘Steven’ Lozina had to be removed from sentence hearing after yelling out foul-mouthed racist abuseA man who viciously attacked a heavily pregnant Muslim woman in a Sydney cafe has been jailed for at least two years.But Rana Elasmar and her husband fear Stipe “Steven” Lozina, who was removed from his sentence hearing after disrupting the court with a racist outburst, will hurt others when released. Continue reading...

Experts say Growth in the Americas programme is attempt to reassert US control – and seems likely to anatagonise BeijingGrowing tensions between the US and China have prompted clashes at the United Nations, accusations of spying and rumblings of a global trade war.In Latin America, the rivalry has recently prompted a public relations battle over which superpower could provide ventilators and PPE during the pandemic, outcry over a Chinese deepwater fishing fleet and renewed pressure over the adoption of Huawei technology in 5G networks. Continue reading...

Former Labour leader and PM’s father caught breaking laws on rule of six and masks

Russian opposition figure poisoned by nerve agent says he has no ‘other versions’ of how crime was committedThe Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who is recovering in Germany after being poisoned with a nerve agent in Russia, has accused Vladimir Putin of being behind the attack, in an interview with a German newspaper.Navalny’s supporters have frequently maintained that such an attack could only have been ordered at the top levels, though the Kremlin has steadfastly denied any involvement in it. Continue reading...

Pent-up demand on display at start of Golden Week after months of paralysis

Danish director Malou Reymann tells the story of a father transitioning to female with almost too much empathyDanish director Malou Reymann makes her debut feature with this gentle, open-hearted drama based on her own childhood experience of her dad transitioning to female. The story is told from the perspective of 11-year-old Emma (Kaya Toft Loholt). But Reymann turns the dial on the empathy machine up to 11 – balancing the feelings of all her characters so evenly and with such generosity that in the end I did feel that the niceness of her film left it a bit pale dramatically.Related: Disclosure: behind Laverne Cox's Netflix documentary on trans representation Continue reading...

MUA says it will suspend industrial action until a Fair Work hearing in late October, a move the company claims was forced by public opinionTalks between the maritime union and Patrick Terminals have failed to seal a pay deal but the union has agreed to suspend all industrial action until later in October.After two days of conciliation, the Maritime Union of Australia has decided to suspend its actions until the Fair Work Commission can hear the company’s bid to permanently terminate the actions on 26 and 27 October. Continue reading...

The US chain’s sandwiches do not meet definition of bread or a staple food, Supreme Court rules in tax caseThe Irish Supreme court has ruled that the bread served at Subway – a US sandwich food chain with branches in more than 100 countries – cannot be defined as bread.Under Ireland’s Value-Added Tax Act of 1972 it cannot even be defined as a staple food, according to the Irish Independent, because it contains too much sugar. Continue reading...

David Irvine says the government could do a better job explaining the benefits of foreign investment amid community concernsThe Morrison government needs to do a better job of explaining the benefits of foreign investment because of underlying community concerns “that foreigners are buying up the farm, they’re taking over”, a senior adviser to the government has said.David Irvine, the former Asio spy agency chief who now heads the foreign investment review board (Firb), clashed with the outspoken Liberal National party MP George Christensen, who is chairing a trade inquiry and using it to campaign for Australia to reduce its economic dependence on China. Continue reading...

Human rights campaigners warn reinstating capital punishment ‘would be a huge step backwards’, as attack on young woman reignites debateThe brutal killing of a young woman has reignited a debate in Tunisia over capital punishment, with the country’s president suggesting an end to a decades-old moratorium on the death penalty.President Kais Saied told a meeting of the country’s national security council on Monday that “murder deserves the death penalty” and urged the security forces to redouble their efforts in countering what he characterised as a nationwide increase in crime. Continue reading...

The national security law brought brutality to the streets of the city I love. Yet I believe we can regain our freedom

Female musicians say abuse by gurus has been an open secret for years in a culture where ‘toxic and old-fashioned patriarchy’ holds swayOne of India’s most venerated cultural traditions – the centuries-old guru-shishya (disciple) method of learning classical music and dance – has been hit by allegations of sexual abuse.A group of 90 female classical musicians issued a statement in September, alleging sexual abuse and exploitation of female disciples by their gurus. They described a “fear-driven culture of silence” that forced women to submit to the sexual demands of their gurus for fear of having to end their careers. Continue reading...

At least 12 died in Australia’s offshore detention network, while thousands of others suffered mental illness and self harmA Downing Street plan to consider emulating Australia’s offshore detention system for asylum seekers risks creating a fresh “human rights disaster”, experts familiar with the immigration policy have said.On Wednesday, the Guardian reported that documents from the Foreign Office revealed Downing St had sought its advice on “negotiating an offshore asylum processing facility similar to the Australian model in Papua New Guinea and Nauru”. Continue reading...

Telephone intercepts reveal Daryl Maguire encouraged a property investor to attend a Liberal fundraiser featuring premier Gladys BerejiklianThe former New South Wales Liberal MP Daryl Maguire would have earned more than $690,000 for helping to “grease the wheels” in a lucrative sale of land near the Western Sydney airport, a corruption inquiry has heard.Telephone intercepts also reveal that Maguire encouraged a property investor, William Luong, to attend a Liberal fundraiser featuring the premier, Gladys Berejiklian, despite Luong’s concerns that he was classified as a property developer and was not allowed to attend. Continue reading...