World news | The Guardian

Natalie Elphicke distances herself from letter to home secretary about Channel crossings

John Quigley has introduced emergency legislation into parliament in a bid to ‘prevent potentially dire consequences for the state’The mining billionaire Clive Palmer is suing the Western Australian government for $30bn, the state’s attorney general has revealed.The WA attorney general, John Quigley, introduced emergency legislation into the state’s parliament on Tuesday in a bid to “prevent potentially dire consequences for the state” after Palmer and his company, Mineralogy, lodged the claim as part of a dispute related to one of the businessman’s iron ore projects in the Pilbara region. Continue reading...

Police in Minsk use rubber bullets and stun grenades against protesters during second night of violence

Experts suspect greater social contact among teenagers spreads Covid-19 more quickly, but the science is unclear

The aged care royal commission hears authorities gave conflicting advice about whether to send infected residents to hospitalThe head of Sydney’s Newmarch House aged care home has spoken out about a “frustrating level of dysfunction” between state and federal health authorities who gave conflicting advice about whether to send infected residents to hospital during the early weeks of a deadly Covid-19 outbreak.The aged care royal commission on Tuesday heard evidence about how Newmarch House responded to the coronavirus outbreak, which resulted in 37 residents testing positive and 17 dying. The inquiry was told about the inherent infection control issues aged care facilities face if they choose to pursue a “hospital in the home” approach to treat residents in-house. Continue reading...

The auction of items once treasured by Queensland’s most controversial couple reveal a large collection of kitsch souvenirs and nightmarish car vasesFor much of 2020, time has felt like it has been pushing through molasses.Always an artificial construct, hours are loaded with fatigue, adrenaline and a sense of getting nowhere. Last week may have been a lifetime ago. September will be here in the blink of an eye. Continue reading...

People working from home share ideas on how not to overheat amid soaring temperatures in BritainAfter months of working from home, hunched over laptops at small kitchen tables, Monday may well have been the hardest day for many. Temperatures reached as high as 35.2C at Heathrow and housebound workers took to social media to share their dissatisfaction.“WFH in this heat is horrid! I now really miss the air con at work that I always complained about being too cold,” tweeted Raj Kaur Bilkhu. Continue reading...

State and local governments facing deep shortfalls wrestle with the devastating economic impact of the coronavirusEvery day, New Yorkers throw out 10,000 tons of trash – a third of which is food and yard scraps that could skip the incinerators and landfills and be turned into compost.Over the last several years, a curbside pick-up program allowed New Yorkers to compost their food and yard scraps by putting them in a brown bin from the city that would be picked up just like trash. Continue reading...

Newspaper prints 500,000 copies, up from 100,000, as readers queue for hours to buy pro-democracy tabloidHong Kong residents have rallied behind the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily after its founder Jimmy Lai was detained under a controversial national security law being used to crack down on dissent.Residents lined up around 2am on Tuesday, hours after the daily tabloid’s offices were raided by police following Lai’s arrest, to buy copies of the paper in a show of support. Many purchased the paper in bulk, leaving notes in convenience stores urging others to take a copy. Others left stacks of the paper on stairs or in their apartment compounds. One reader wrote to the paper: “Even if Apple Daily only publishes a bundle of blank sheets, we will be buying all of them.” Continue reading...

Video showed police officer holding woman around the neck, sweeping her to the ground and kneeling on her backVictoria police have arrested and charged a young woman in Melbourne who was captured on video allegedly being choked and pinned to the ground by a police officer.In video footage posted initially on social media, the woman – who was subsequently found to have had an exemption for wearing a face mask – can be heard shouting “He’s choking me” as she was arrested on Wellington Street in Collingwood on Monday evening. Continue reading...

Software hailed as a ‘game-changer’ in providing early warning for humanitarian relief efforts as virus fuels conflictCoronavirus is predicted to push more than 1 million people from their homes across the Sahel, creating havoc in an already highly fragile region, according to new forecasting software.Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Nigeria in west Africa are predicted to see displacement as a result of the increasing conflict, unemployment and human rights abuses brought on by fallout from the coronavirus, the analytical tool developed by the humanitarian group Danish Refugee Council (DRC) has found. Continue reading...

Shielding rules were relaxed in England on 1 August, but I’m not rushing to the shops or beach any time soon

The government’s authoritarian posturing ignores the facts about asylum seekers coming to BritainAn invasion is what happens when a state uses military force to violently enter another country. It does not look at all like the recent images of small groups of people, many from countries that have themselves been invaded or bombed, crossing an international border in search of asylum. And yet the rhetoric of invasion has returned to British politics amid a growing moral panic over people crossing the Channel in small boats.What’s new is the method of travel, not the fact that people are travelling. Fewer lorries crossing the channel because of the pandemic means fewer vehicles in which to hide – which has pushed more people to attempt journeys in inflatable dinghies. The number of people doing this has risen sharply in 2020: just over 4,000 so far, a figure that can seem alarming when presented without context. (Germany and France each receive more than twice the number of asylum applications per year than the UK.) Continue reading...

As the Guardian/KHN database shows, too many have given their lives to keep us safe – but with decisive action we can stop Covid-19 in its tracksThey chose not to hold their own children’s hands so they could hold ours. They intubated us and kept our ICU rooms germ-free. They brushed our teeth and switched our position so we could be more comfortable. As they always have, they put our health first, although this time it was in place of their own.Related: A public servant from Queens, a Navajo home health aide: US healthcare workers who died from Covid-19 Continue reading...

Group due to be flown out this week as Home Office targets those who arrived in small boatsA group of asylum seekers due to be flown out of the UK this week in a Home Office operation targeting people who arrived on small boats have launched a mass legal challenge to their removal, the Guardian has learned.Up to 20 people are due to be removed on the charter flight on Wednesday, the first since the coronavirus lockdown to specifically target asylum seekers who have crossed the Channel from mainland Europe by small boats or other clandestine means. Continue reading...

Australian Livestock Exporters’ Council CEO says killings in the video are inappropriate and unacceptableFederal agencies are investigating the slaughter of Australian cattle in the Indonesian province of Aceh after distressing new video footage emerged.Animals Australia on Friday made a complaint to the department of agriculture about the alleged breaches at two facilities which the activist group said involved practices first exposed in 2011. The footage was gathered in late July and early August. Continue reading...

BP ordered to pay Western Australia oil refinery worker for lost wages, after his parody of bosses got him firedAn oil refinery worker who was sacked for creating a Hitler parody of his bosses has been awarded $200,000 in compensation.The employee, a technician on a BP refinery in Western Australia, was sacked after he used an oft-parodied scene from the 2004 film Downfall by Oliver Hirschbiegel about the final days of Hitler and Nazi Germany to depict his bosses during a tense wage negotiation. Continue reading...

Joseph Wu tells visiting US health secretary Taiwan lives under constant threat of its freedoms being quashed by BeijingChina is trying to turn Taiwan into another Hong Kong, the island’s foreign minister warned on Tuesday as he met with a senior US official making a historic diplomatic trip.A crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong has gathered pace since China imposed a sweeping security law on the financial hub in June, with opposition politicians disqualified and activists arrested. Continue reading...

On the day the WHO declared a pandemic, 52,000 fans – including 3,000 from Spain – piled into Anfield to watch the Reds play Atlético. Weeks later, the city was a Covid-19 hotspot. The family of one victim explain why they need answersNo one knows for sure when Richard “Richie” Mawson contracted coronavirus, but, if his family were to guess, they would say it was related to the Champions League game between Liverpool and Atlético Madrid at Anfield on 11 March.Richie, 70, a retired train driver from Kirkdale, Liverpool, was in the Sir Kenny Dalglish stand that day, as he was for every Liverpool game. A season ticket holder, Richie had been attending Liverpool matches since he was a teenager. His uncle would take him to watch the Reds, back when Everton were the more successful club, and the Blues fans would give them stick. Continue reading...

Something has gone badly wrong with the way we keep pets. Our casual cruelties are a symptom of our unhealthy relationship with other species. By Esther WoolfsonI must have been about four when we drove to buy a dog. The day is now only a haze of Sunday afternoon impressions of rain and green, of the muddy track somewhere in the Stirlingshire countryside, a room, a log fire, and the two chosen puppies who would be the confidants of my growing up. The black dog died when I was in my early teens, and the brown one, the last dog I knew well, shortly before I left school. Our buying them must have been part of the growing tendency for post-second world war pet-keeping, which had been increasing since Victorian times, and was about to expand into the vast pet trade of today.But what makes us choose one creature over another? Many studies have evaluated the importance of a species’ appearance in determining its popularity, commercial potential or conservation status. The conclusions are dismaying: “An animal’s attractiveness substantially increases support for its protection,” one study says, while another concludes: “A few charismatic and cute species … tend to receive most of the conservation funds and policy attention.” Creatures are ranked – “the 20 most charismatic species” – or described as “powerful commercial icons” or “the world’s cutest animals”. Even the birds in our gardens are subject to our caprices. The results of a study on the “likeability” of garden birds show that we like songbirds (even though we may not be able to define correctly what a songbird is), preferring robins and blackbirds to corvids, gulls, pigeons and starlings. We consider the former attractive but the latter argumentative, competitive and noisy – all necessary, natural behaviours of wild birds. “Charismatic”, “iconic”, “cute” – in a time of devastating and irreversible species loss, can these really be the measures of our love? Continue reading...

Consensus crumbles after Liz Truss reportedly sought to make the cheese a part of negotiationsHaving promised to rush through a post-Brexit trade deal, Japan and Britain made significant progress only to discover that the fate of Stilton has driven a wedge between them.During recent talks in London, international trade secretary Liz Truss and the Japanese foreign minister, Toshimitsu Motegi, reached a “substantial” preliminary agreement on trade, promising to conclude a preliminary deal by the end of this month. Continue reading...

Photographer Adrian Bullock was snorkelling off Lady Elliot Island, near Bundaberg, Queensland when this 4+ metre great white shark came into his view. Bullock realised he was 40 metres from the boat that took him to the dive spot, and remained still long enough to see the large shark was either well-fed or pregnant as it drew closer towards him. The photographer remained calm during the encounter, with the close swim-by only the second great white sighting off the island in 25 years. He shared the video because he wants 'people to see that they aren't man eating monsters' Continue reading...

US considers blocking infected citizens returning; Australian outbreak trends down; Singapore economy plunges 43%

Host Henry Deane remembers Belarus’s opposition leader arriving in Roscrea at the age of 12Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the woman who has been catapulted into political stardom in Belarus by her push to dislodge the man often referred to as Europe’s last dictator, may be an accidental challenger, standing in Sunday’s presidential election only because her opposition activist husband Sergei was arrested.But a hint of the strength and resilience that has made her a courageous if unlikely opponent who has refused to accept Alexander Lukashenko’s claim to victory in a poll marred by vote-rigging may have been present at age of 12, when she arrived to spend a summer in rural Ireland. Continue reading...

Relationship therapists and lawyers say number of new clients is comparable to the annual post-holiday separation rise

A seal has been spotted eating a large fish in a river in Melbourne’s inner north-west while the city remains in stage-four coronavirus lockdown. The seal delighted passersby who were out on their one hour of sanctioned daily exercise. Melbourne local Alicia Pavlis filmed the seal flapping about in the Maribyrnong River. ‘We might be a little more excited about things like this than normal,' Pavlis said. ‘But it really is all about enjoying the brief moments of respite between heavy global news and grim prospects, and it’s these small things that keep us going’ Continue reading...

It is a week since the devastating explosion rocked Beirut, killing more than 200 people. As shock turns to anger and the cabinet resigns, Bethan McKernan and Martin Chulov report on what comes next for the Lebanese peopleThe deadly explosion that ripped through Beirut last week has left more than 200 people dead, thousands injured and hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes. The blast happened in a summer of already simmering tension in Lebanon as an economic crisis has taken a devastating toll on the country.The Guardian’s Martin Chulov, who is based in Beirut, describes the moment his apartment was rocked by the blast – and what he witnessed that day. He tells Mythili Rao the scenes were apocalyptic, and worsened the closer he walked to the site of the explosion at the city’s docks. Continue reading...

‘I will believe my own eyes,’ says Svetlana Tikhanovskaya after commission says Alexander Lukashenko won landslideShare your reaction on the Belarus election resultAt least one person has been killed and dozens injured in clashes between riot police and protesters in Belarus in the second night of protests against Alexander Lukashenko after the president claimed victory in elections amid accusations of vote-rigging.The fighting late on Monday appeared to escalate as police once again employed rubber bullets and stun grenades against demonstrators, while some shot back with fireworks and several Molotov cocktails, according to a Guardian reporter who estimated the crowd at several thousand people. Continue reading...

Heavy rains caused flooding and three evacuation orders on the New South Wales south coast over the past three days as howling winds and damaging surf battered much of the state’s coastline. Damaging winds with gusts of more than 90km/h were recorded along the Sydney and Illawarra coast, reaching 93km/h at Norah Head on the Central Coast. Waves also peaked at just over five metres in Sydney with much of the coastline from Ulladulla to Port Macquarie warned of hazardous surf. Heavy rains caused flooding with the Shoalhaven River at Nowra peaking at 4.13m on Monday – its highest level since 1991.• NSW weather: flooding eases on south coast but many residents yet to return home Continue reading...

What are the restrictions within Victoria and the border closures with NSW and Queensland? How far can I travel, and how many people can I have over at my house? Untangle Australia’s Covid-19 laws and guidelines with our guide

Terrence Higgins Trust advocates face coverings and not using face-to-face positions

While the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic has so far spared the Pacific, its economies are in free-fall, the region’s chief diplomat warnsBeyond the health and economic crises of Covid-19, the global pandemic has the potential to cause political instability and undermine state security across the Pacific, the region’s chief diplomat has warned.Dame Meg Taylor, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum, said the region’s economies were struggling with the virus-induced shocks, and a prolonged crisis could worsen existing problems of hunger, poor healthcare, and state fragility. Continue reading...

Premier of Victoria will be the first witness called at the second sitting of the Covid-19 inquiry on Tuesday. Follow live10.18pm BSTWith the federal aged care response under its own microscope, Melissa Davey has this story, from Melbourne:

PM Hassan Diab forced to exit, saying the corruption is ‘bigger than the state’Lebanon’s besieged government has fallen, one week after a cataclysmic explosion destroyed Beirut port, with the country’s prime minister, Hassan Diab, claiming the disaster was the result of endemic corruption.Diab announced the resignation of the government after more than a third of ministers quit their posts, forcing Diab himself to resign. Continue reading...

PM says government will keep looking at data in all countries Britons are travelling to

Ministers should respond with compassion and pragmatism to an upsurge in arrivals of small boats. Instead, we get histrionicsWhat do the images of cramped dinghies in the Channel make you feel when you see them? Or pictures of their passengers on the decks of grey Border Force vessels, or disembarking on beaches? More than 4,100 migrants and refugees have reached the UK this year so far in small boats, most of them arriving in Kent. Almost 600 arrived in a surge of crossings between Thursday and Sunday last week.While they remain a tiny proportion of the total number of asylum seekers in the UK, which was 35,566 in 2019, the steep increase in arrivals has thrust immigration and asylum back to the top of the news. But the hate mill has been grinding away for months, with the Brexit party leader, Nigel Farage, using his social media channels and appearances to churn up public anxiety about what these migrants might do when they get here – while crushing out any grains of more generous impulses. Continue reading...

Marcus Coutain, 48, who is black, was filmed pleading with officers to ‘get off my neck’ as he was arrestedA suspended Scotland Yard officer is under investigation by the police watchdog for common assault and gross misconduct after appearing to kneel on a man’s neck during an arrest.The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is looking into the manner of the arrest of Marcus Coutain, 48, who was filmed pleading with officers to “get off my neck” as he was handcuffed on the pavement in Islington, north London, last month. Continue reading...

Businesses in areas where restrictions are being eased are urged to be careful about how they collect information

Exclusive: experts say staff and pupils should be screened for virus, possibly by group testingScientists have called for routine Covid testing of teachers and pupils alongside a robust test-and-trace system, amid a debate over how to safely reopen schools in England.On Sunday, the children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, said teachers and pupils should have weekly tests, but Nick Gibb, the schools minister, ruled out the idea, saying instead that those who are symptomatic should be tested. Continue reading...

Traffic stops are not routinely recorded meaning no data is available on why the power is usedCampaigners and lawyers have called for traffic stops to be subject to the same scrutiny and oversight as other stop and search powers after a Labour MP was pulled over by police.Dawn Butler, the former shadow equalities minister, accused the police of being institutionally racist after the car she was being driven in by her black friend was pulled over in Hackney, east London. Continue reading...

WHO says virus has shown no seasonal pattern and tells western Europe to react fast

Angelo Boletti, 83, ordered to pay €166 after complaints about 4.30am wake-up callAn Italian pensioner has been fined because his cockerel kept waking up the neighbours at the crack of dawn.A police officer staked out the home of Angelo Boletti in Castiraga Vidardo, a town in Lombardy, to prove the truth of neighbours’ complaints that the bird, called Carlino, crowed at 4.30am. Continue reading...

Town councillor was one of four admins for group in which another user posted KKK imageOrganisers of Black Lives Matter protests in Sandbach, Cheshire, have been threatened and doxxed – subjected to the malicious spread of private information – in a Facebook group for which one of the town’s councillors was an administrator.Comments in the Facebook group, Sandbach Sarcastic Society, which has more than 5,300 members, included details of where one organiser was said to live. One person suggested sending the details to the English Defence League, while another posted a picture of the Ku Klux Klan. Continue reading...

Pro-democracy activists allege five British officers have taken part in brutal actions against protestersPro-democracy activists have launched a private prosecution in London against five British officers working for the Hong Kong police, alleging they have taken part in brutal actions against protesters.The officers – who have not been named – occupy senior roles inside Hong Kong’s local police force. They are accused of torturing anti-government demonstrators, who have been protesting since June last year over an extradition bill and security law imposed by Beijing. Continue reading...

Leading pro-democracy figure detained over alleged foreign collusion as police search Apple Daily offices

Experts compare situation with 1989 revolutions that toppled Europe’s communist regimesFor a man who has spent a quarter of a century building a political brand based on stability, there is no doubt that the events unfolding in Minsk will change politics in Belarus and the standing of its veteran leader Alexander Lukashenko forever.What is not yet clear is whether the new political era that will follow the protests will be one of dynamic change and a new government, or one of a sustained and bloody crackdown. Continue reading...

First minister apologises after predicted awards downgraded more heavily in poorer areasNicola Sturgeon has apologised to tens of thousands of Scottish teenagers whose exam results were downgraded last week and promised urgent changes to their awards.The first minister attempted to defuse a growing crisis for her government by confirming her deputy, John Swinney, would lay out proposals to regrade results in the Scottish parliament on Tuesday. Continue reading...

What are the restrictions within Victoria and the border closures with NSW and Queensland? How far can I travel, and how many people can I have over at my house? Untangle Australia’s Covid-19 laws and guidelines with our guide

Revelation provokes outrage at the five deputies whose identities are unknown due to privacy law

Gruesome find halts work on restoring newly purchased complex in prestigious areaWork on restoring an abandoned €35m (£27m) mansion in one of the most prestigious areas of Paris has been suspended after the discovery of a corpse that had been decomposing in the basement for 30 years, local media have reported.Minutes from Les Invalides and the French prime minister’s official residence, and backing onto the former home of Yves Saint Laurent, the vast but crumbling complex at 12 rue Oudinot in the heart of Paris had been empty for more than 30 years. Continue reading...