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PM hints at law change to make it easier to deport people who make dangerous voyageBoris Johnson has branded attempts by people to cross the Channel in small boats as a “very bad and stupid and dangerous and criminal thing to do” and hinted at changing the law to make it easier to deport such arrivals.Meanwhile a French politician has warned that the UK’s decision to send in the Royal Navy “won’t change anything”, and a former Home Office official has said he was sceptical of the plans. Continue reading...

Social Democrats name pragmatic ex-mayor Olaf Scholz as candidate for chancellor in 2021Germany’s Social Democrats have fired the starting gun in the race to replace Angela Merkel as chancellor by announcing the pragmatist finance minister Olaf Scholz as their candidate for the job.One of the two pillars of 20th-century democracy in Germany, the Social Democratic party (SPD) has seen its support wither away since joining Merkel’s government as junior coalition partner in 2013. It lies third in the polls behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Greens, on about 14% of the vote. Continue reading...

Investigation focusing on why chemicals were stored at port for six years despite warningsA Lebanese judge has begun questioning the heads of the country’s security agencies over last week’s devastating blast in Beirut, as another cabinet minister resigned in protest.Judge Ghassan El Khoury began by questioning Maj Gen Tony Saliba, the head of state security, according to the state-run National News Agency. It gave no further details, but other generals are scheduled to be questioned. Continue reading...

Exclusive: doctor’s warning comes as two nurses at hospital caring for people from care homes test positive for coronavirusTwo nurses working at a private hospital accepting residents from Victoria’s beleaguered aged care system have tested positive for Covid-19, with a senior doctor describing the mass transportation of elderly residents to hospitals as a “catastrophe waiting to happen”.The Victorian premier in July responded to coronavirus outbreaks in aged care homes throughout the state by saying he had “no confidence in infection control” in some of the facilities and that residents from those homes would be moved into private and public hospitals. Continue reading...

At least seven people dead and one missing on island of EviaGreek emergency services are clearing debris and searching for people potentially still trapped by flood waters after flash floods sparked by a storm on the island of Evia left seven people dead and one missing over the weekend.The dead include an elderly couple discovered in their flooded home on Sunday morning, and an eight-month-old baby found in a flooded ground-floor apartment. Continue reading...

Jihadists suspected of attack that killed six French and one Nigerian aid workers and a guideEmmanuel Macron has condemned as “cowardly” the killing of seven aid workers – six French and one Nigerien – and a guide by suspected jihadists at a wildlife reserve in Niger.“Several of our compatriots and Nigeriens were cowardly murdered yesterday in Niger in a deadly attack,” the French president said in a statement posted on Twitter. “I share the pain of their families and loved ones. Some were hired for the most altruistic of missions: to help people.” Continue reading...

In Melbourne, some families haven’t known whether their loved ones are alive or dead, which is “unforgivable”, the barrister assisting the inquiry says

Video from a polling station in Minsk, Belarus, appears to show a member of the electoral commission climbing down a ladder from a second-storey window with a bag assumed to contain voting slips.Clashes broke out in cities across Belarus on Sunday evening as riot police clashed with protesters after Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled for 26 years, claimed a landslide victory in a presidential election marred by allegations of vote-rigging.

Hard rock ‘genius’ helmed nine classic Iron Maiden albums and worked with Deep Purple, Fleetwood Mac and othersMartin Birch, the producer whose bright but heavy sound was applied to classic albums by Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and more, has died aged 71. No cause of death has been announced.Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale tweeted: “It is with a very heavy heart I’ve just had verified my very dear friend & producer Martin Birch has passed away … Martin was a huge part of my life … helping me from the first time we met through until Slide It In … My thoughts & prayers to his family, friends & fans.” Continue reading...

Labor spokeswoman says delay was a ‘catastrophic communications’ failure that may have been deadly for Melbourne aged care home’s residentsThe aged care regulator has been accused of a “catastrophic communications failure” causing a “potentially deadly delay” after it was revealed it took four days to inform the federal government about a Covid-19 case at Melbourne’s St Basil’s aged care home.The aged care quality and safety commissioner, Janet Anderson, wrote to the Senate committee on Covid-19 on Friday to clarify that the commission had learned on 10 July that a staff member had tested positive on 8 July. Continue reading...

The prime minister stresses the importance of premiers’ political accountability – but when it comes to the commonwealth, he is searching for a leave passScott Morrison and his ministers have developed a preoccupation with attribution. Take one, obvious example. Australia’s second wave of coronavirus infections is referred to on high rotation as “the Victorian wave”, lest anyone be confused about the origins of the outbreak.Over the past couple of days, the most senior Victorian in the Morrison government, Josh Frydenberg, has been pursuing project attribution down to the footnotes. “What we’re dealing with here is hundreds of new cases in Victoria every day, 97-to-98% of new cases in Australia are coming from Victoria alone,” the treasurer said last week. Continue reading...

Sub-Saharan hospitals are dependent on costly oxygen from multinational suppliers. As Covid-19 spreads, doctors are being forced to make terrible choicesAs Covid-19 spreads throughout Africa, a potentially deadly lack of oxygen is leaving doctors unable to offer essential treatment.Some experts put considerable blame on two multinational gas suppliers that dominate the market for oxygen cylinders across much of the continent, saying that their high prices and systems make the treatment unaffordable. Continue reading...

Britain takes in very few of the world’s asylum seekers and only a minority of them arrive by boatQ: Media reports suggest that many refugees are making a beeline for the UK. Is this correct?A: The UK is home to just 1% of the world’s 29.6 million refugees. Asylum seekers make up a very small percentage of overall migrants to the UK with study and work cited as the main reasons why people want to come to the country, according to research from Oxford’s Migration Observatory. Asylum applications in the UK are relatively low – 35,099 in the year ending March 2020, significantly lower than a peak of 84,000 applications in 2002. Continue reading...

Cases in Britain rise over 1,000 a day for first time since June; one in every 65 Americans has tested positive; US health secretary praises Taiwan

Audrey Gillan was embedded with coalition forces 17 years ago when a British patrol was attacked by US aircraft. She talks to the remaining crew about their struggle to come to terms with what happenedThey were waving a white flag: Iraqi civilians desperately trying to signal to the British army patrol approaching their village. The five-vehicle convoy slowed down, cautiously closing the hatches of their small Scimitar and Spartan tanks. But as they nudged forward, the two front vehicles were strafed with 30mm cannon, piercing their armoured walls and setting off dozens of boxes of ammunition. Within seconds, they were ablaze.Believing they were being attacked by the approaching Iraqis, the first Scimitar, driven by an 18-year-old trooper, Chris Finney, reversed, throwing the vehicle’s commander Steven Gerrard from the turret. In the wagon behind, the troop leader, Alex MacEwen, and driver Joe Woodgate escaped. They made it to a drainage ditch, but their gunner, Matty Hull, was still trapped inside. Continue reading...

Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has imposed stage three Covid restrictions across regional Victoria from 6 August

Small towns look to bring back life and the sound of children after young Spaniards leave in search of workOn the wall of a small flat in Pareja, not far from the chemist, the plaza mayor and the 16th-century church, hangs a picture of a wooden farmhouse set among the palms and endless plains of western Venezuela.Were the painting bigger, it would show the mud-brick bread oven where Ángel Márquez and his family baked bread to sell, and the cows, the pigs and the horse they left behind when they finally decided enough was enough. Continue reading...

Guardian Australia analysis and map shows how the pattern of Covid-19 has changed by region and throughout Sydney. Live data updates will track the numbers throughout New South Wales

We didn’t know the pandemic would separate us for five months. ‘People in love never give up,’ a man at his hotel said to me

The PM promised transformative government, but has so far largely maintained the status quoJacinda Ardern was travelling in a taxi in July 2017, two months before the election that would make her prime minister, when arguably the most important message in her nine-year parliamentary career came through. Labour’s poll results were crashing, the message said, and the party leader – the austere Andrew Little – was considering stepping down. Would Ardern, the then deputy leader, consider stepping up?In the following days calls went back and forth. The party activists (and MPs at risk of losing their seats) were in the pits, and Little told the country’s leading current affairs show resigning had crossed his mind. From that admission, the poll numbers could only fall further. The Greens were at 15% , sucking up votes to Labour’s left while the conservative National party was polling in the mid-to-high 40s, maintaining an iron grip on the centre right. Continue reading...

Thousands of protesters have taken to the parliamentary precinct in the capital demanding the fall of the government days after a major explosion rocked Beirut, killing 159 people injuring more than 6,000. The protests began at sunset and continued into the night, with demonstrators clashing with police and soldiers. The demonstrations come as two government ministers and a string of MPs resigned from their posts, loosening the government's already parlous grip on power

Police, firefighters and HM Coastguard were called in to search for the child who got into difficulties in the river Leven near Balloch BridgeA search for a missing child in a river in the west of Scotland has ended with police finding the 12-year-old girl’s body.Police Scotland were called to a report of the girl being in difficulty in the river Leven at Balloch Bridge about 25 miles north-west of Glasgow at 6.45pm on Sunday, sparking a search also involving firefighters and HM Coastguard. Continue reading...

NSW rescinds arrangement to allow residents to pass through state to return home as ACT offers to dispatch police escort• Follow the Australia live blog

Eight-month-old found dead in a house after torrential rain causes rivers to burst their banks and blocking roadsSeven people have died, including a baby, as torrential rains and floods swept the Greek island of Evia, damaging dozens of houses and blocking roads.The eight-month-old baby was found dead in a house in the village of Politika on Sunday, said a spokesman for firefighters involved in rescue efforts. The baby’s parents were unharmed. Continue reading...

Riot police deployed in Minsk and about 20 other cities in some of the biggest clashes in the country’s history

New law in Shenzhen means buildings can be developed with 95%, rather than 100%, support from residents – promoting concern over erosion of rightsThey stand as eyesores to most passers by and potential public health risks to authorities, decaying buildings wrapped in tangles of exposed wire, studded with protruding leaky plastic pipes, vegetation billowing from cracks and terraces where particulates from polluted air have accumulated over time.With skyscrapers and ultramodern developments on every side, some of these “nail houses” are also sitting on land worth millions of dollars in Shenzhen’s inferno of a property market, where new-unit and second-hand home prices rival London. Continue reading...

Fears of flash flooding in parts of country, while experts warn extreme heat could become the normOver a month’s worth of rain could fall within two hours on parts of Britain this week, causing flash flooding, while an ongoing heatwave is set to break records.Police and the coastguard issued warnings over the weekend as two people died – a woman after a collision between a jet ski and a boat in north Wales, and a man believed to have drowned in a lake at a Norfolk beauty spot. Continue reading...

SES orders parts of Moruya, Nowra and Captains Flat to evacuate as kayaker in Canberra dies and 400 calls for help come from Sydney and Blue Mountains

Why asylum seekers are resorting to desperate measures to reach the ‘better, fairer’ UKSami was on a beach near Calais, crying, when Claire Moseley found him. The charity worker got a text asking for help and went to collect him in the early hours of the morning.He and three friends, one of them only 17, had pooled their money to buy a three-seater kayak from the sports retailer Decathlon to try to make the arduous 20-mile journey to Britain, as 4,000 others have successfully done this year. Continue reading...

UK figure is the highest since June; Greece sees biggest daily rise; US passes 5m cases

Monday: US marks a grim milestone after reporting 5m cases of Covid-19. Plus: towns evacuated on NSW south coastGood morning, this is Emilie Gramenz bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Monday 10 August. Continue reading...

Emmanuel Macron’s office confirms six French volunteers with ACTED relief organisation died in attack on SundayGunmen on motorcycles killed six French aid workers, a Nigerien guide and a driver in a wildlife park in Niger on Sunday, officials said.The group were attacked in a giraffe reserve 65km (40 miles) from the west African country’s capital, Niamey, the governor of Tillaberi region, Tidjani Ibrahim Katiella, told Reuters. “They were intercepted and killed,” he said. Continue reading...

Clashes broke out between rioters and police as global donors pledged recovery aidThousands of protesters pelted Lebanon’s parliamentary precinct with rocks on Sunday, demanding the fall of the government in the wake of the catastrophic blast that destroyed parts of Beirut last week.The violent rally took place around sunset, as an international donor conference launched to fund the enormous cost of recovery resolved that the country would not be abandoned. Continue reading...

The Labour MP describes her experience of being pulled over with a friend in London

Jeremy Menesses, 17, was chased down Oxford Street by an attacker with a macheteA teenager stabbed to death after being chased down Oxford Street during a mass brawl has been named as Jeremy Menesses, 17, from south London.Metropolitan police officers were called at 5.38pm on Saturday to reports of an assault on Market Place close to the West End shopping street and found the victim with a stab wound. He was taken to hospital for treatment, but was pronounced dead at 7.30pm. Continue reading...

Hume was a fervent supporter of European integration, writes Harry Schneider, while Brian Simpson and Catharine Sadler remember his work and qualities as a leaderAmong the many words written about John Hume recently, relatively little has been said about the European dimension of his beliefs. Reading Martin Kettle’s comments (John Hume’s politics went far beyond Northern Ireland – his vision is as urgent as ever, 5 August), I was reminded of a story I heard him tell more than once.As a newly elected MEP in 1979, he went for a walk one evening across the bridge over the Rhine from French Strasbourg to the German town Kehl. In the middle of the bridge he stopped and imagined someone else standing there 30 years earlier – just after the second world war, with Europe lying in ruins. He used to say: “If that person had proposed that in 30 years’ time we would all be together in a united Europe, with the French still being French and the Germans still being German, they would have been sent to a psychiatrist.” Continue reading...

Car driven by a friend pulled over by officers who later admitted they made a mistake

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya appears at polling station in election president is expected to win

Director general admits mistake following 18,000 complaintsThe BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, has apologised after the N-word was used in a TV news broadcast, following mass complaints and the resignation of one of the corporation’s radio DJs.“Every organisation should be able to acknowledge when it has made a mistake. We made one here,” Hall said in an email to all BBC staff. Continue reading...

Born in Rio’s favelas, Anitta became Brazil’s biggest pop star. Then a political awakening made her even more influential. She talks Bolsonaro, Black Lives Matter and bisexualityAnitta had imagined that this summer would be a break: a period in which she could record new music. It would have followed 10 years in which she became Brazil’s biggest pop star, including stadium tours, a Netflix docuseries about her life, and hits with Madonna, Snoop Dogg and Rita Ora – all of which skyrocketed her from a Rio favela to fame. Instead, she’s been quarantining at home with her five dogs, infiltrating her country’s politics and being touted as a future Brazilian president.I speak to her in early June, just as the coronavirus pandemic is tightening its grip in Brazil. (The country’s death toll is now the second-highest in the world.) Demonstrators have gathered to denounce the president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has urged governors to open states while dismissing Covid-19 as “a little flu” and reminding Brazilians that “we’re all going to die one day”. Some of the protests have expanded to include the issues of systemic racism and police brutality that plague Brazil’s population, which is 50.7% black or mixed race, according to a 2010 census. The country is hot with unrest. Continue reading...

Kate’s first official outing in Amaia mask leads to spike in ‘ditsy print’ search

151 people come ashore on Saturday as French and British ministers prepare to meetTensions are mounting between the UK and France over migrant crossings in the Channel as the number of people who have reached UK shores in small boats this year surpassed 4,000.Families with young children were among hundreds of people who came ashore near Dover this weekend, including 151 on Saturday, the Home Office confirmed. Continue reading...

Lebanon’s information minister, Manal Abdel Samad, has quit in the first government resignation since an explosion in the port of Beirut killed more than 150 people and destroyed large parts of the capital. She apologised to the Lebanese public for failing them in her statement

Developer seeks to cash out of investment in John Nash-designed mansion with views of Regent’s ParkDevelopers have stuck an asking price of £185m on a house overlooking Regent’s Park in central London in what would be the UK’s second most-expensive home purchase.The property firm Zenprop is targeting foreign billionaires as potential buyers of 1-18 York Terrace East as it seeks to cash out of a 2016 investment. Continue reading...

Official measure to be declared this week as coronavirus lockdown shrinks GDP by 21% in second quarterBritain’s economy will be officially declared in recession this week for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis, as the coronavirus outbreak plunges the country into the deepest slump on record.Figures from the Office for National Statistics on Wednesday are expected to show gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of economic prosperity, fell in the three months to June by 21%. Continue reading...

With ‘don’t kill granny’ warnings and talk of an over-50s lockdown, there are fears unity is fraying in the UK

The destruction caused by last week’s explosion in Beirut is visible in drone footage shot in neighbourhoods devastated by the blast. The close-up footage shows buildings reduced to rubble and homes rendered uninhabitable. The explosion in the city’s port killed at least 154 people, injured 6,000 and destroyed a swathe of the city. Officials say the blast, which was felt hundreds of miles away, could have caused up to £11.5bn of damage.

Demonstrators allied to Evo Morales say authorities are using Covid-19 to delay voteDemonstrators in Bolivia have dynamited Andean passes, scattered boulders across highways and dug trenches along rural roads to protest against repeated delays to a rerun of last October’s deeply contentious election, which led to the downfall of the long-serving leftist president, Evo Morales.Amid a mounting death toll from the coronavirus pandemic, more than 100 roadblocks and marches nationwide – convened on Monday by Bolivia’s main workers’ union, and indigenous and campesino movements allied to Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism (Mas) – have brought the country to a standstill for six days. Continue reading...

Music tycoon and entertainer having surgery but his spokeswoman says he is ‘doing fine’Simon Cowell has been taken to hospital with a broken back after falling off an electric bike in California.His spokeswoman said the 60-year-old music mogul, who has a home in Malibu, was undergoing surgery for his injuries but was “doing fine”. Continue reading...

Manal Abdel Samad apologises for failing Lebanese people over fatal Beirut port explosionLebanon’s information minister, Manal Abdel Samad, has quit in the first government resignation since an explosion in the port of Beirut killed more than 150 people and destroyed swathes of the capital.“After the enormous Beirut catastrophe, I announce my resignation from government,” she said on Sunday in a statement , apologising to the Lebanese public for failing them. Continue reading...