They are beacons of western civilisation. But, says an explosive new book, the designs of Europe’s greatest buildings were plundered from the Islamic world – twin towers, rose windows, vaulted ceilings and allAs Notre-Dame cathedral was engulfed by flames last year, thousands bewailed the loss of this great beacon of western civilisation. The ultimate symbol of French cultural identity, the very heart of the nation, was going up in smoke. But Middle East expert Diana Darke was having different thoughts. She knew that the origins of this majestic gothic pile lay not in the pure annals of European Christian history, as many have always assumed, but in the mountainous deserts of Syria, in a village just west of Aleppo to be precise.“Notre-Dame’s architectural design, like all gothic cathedrals in Europe, comes directly from Syria’s Qalb Lozeh fifth-century church,” Darke tweeted on the morning of 16 April, as the dust was still settling in Paris. “Crusaders brought the ‘twin tower flanking the rose window’ concept back to Europe in the 12th century.” Continue reading...

Svetlana Alexievich warns of ‘civil war’ after unrest that followed Sunday’s disputed election resultBelarusian Nobel prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich has condemned police violence against protesters in her country and urged Alexander Lukashenko to go peacefully.The 72-year-old author won the 2015 Nobel literature prize for her work chronicling the horrors of war and life under the repressive Soviet regime including the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Continue reading...

Pro-democracy activist says he did not expect to be arrested so soon given the global outcry, and that it suggested chaos in the ranksJimmy Lai has said he was surprised to be arrested so quickly, and suggested there was “great disorder” among Chinese and Hong Kong authorities about how to handle the territory’s national security law.The 71-year-old media tycoon and prominent pro-democracy figure was arrested on Monday, on suspicion of committing foreign collusion crimes in breach of Beijing’s national security law, and conspiracy to defraud. Continue reading...

Bolivia considers a pragmatic, if not macabre, option as it struggles to keep pace with Covid-19 deathsAs surging Covid-19 cases across Latin America leave cemeteries and funeral homes struggling to keep pace, engineers in Bolivia have come up with a solution as pragmatic as it is macabre: a mobile crematorium.The five-metre by two-and-half-metre oven is small enough to fit on to a trailer, and is powered by locally produced liquefied petroleum gas – making it a cheap option for families who cannot afford a funeral service. Continue reading...

Expats say UK government’s lack of clarity on coronavirus travel restrictions puts livelihoods at risk

Jacinda Ardern sound ominous tone, with expectation of a long lockdown for the country’s biggest city

Glass-walled booths in Seoul won’t let you in unless your temperature is normal

Exclusive: email sent to health workers by Safer Care Victoria says 1,835 workers had been infected with virus at 8 August

Restaurant diners told to order one dish less than number of people under new system criticised as overly controllingThe Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has launched a campaign targeting a new enemy of the country: food waste.“Waste is shameful and thriftiness is honourable,” Xi said in a speech published on Tuesday, describing the amount of food that goes to waste in the country as “shocking and distressing”, according to the state news agency Xinhua. Continue reading...

Home Office says 14 people were flown out, while 19 of those due to be removed had their tickets deferredA charter flight to remove asylum seekers who recently arrived in the UK on small boats took off on Wednesday morning carrying 14 people, the Home Office said, despite last-minute high court actions and other interventions just hours before takeoff.Nineteen people due to fly did not board the plane. The Home Office said 14 people were placed on the charter flight destined for France and Germany. Continue reading...

Heatwave continues to cause disruption as flooding and storm warnings issuedThe UK has had its longest stretch of temperatures exceeding 34C since the 1960s, as warnings of thunderstorms and heavy rain remain in place across the country.The Met Office said the scorching temperatures were recorded in parts of southern England for the sixth day in a row – the first time Britain has experienced such a spell since 1961. Continue reading...

In the end it took £400m of attacking talent, 93 minutes of increasingly frantic football, and a man who mustered up five goals in a single year at Stoke to wrench a thrilling Champions League quarter-final the way of Paris Saint-Germain.It had to be Neymar, one way or another. The world’s most expensive footballer had played for much of the game like a man trapped inside another kind of storyline, finding space fluently but shooting at goal like a man wearing wooden clogs. Continue reading...

Passenger, driver and conductor killed after four carriages leave track in flood-hit areaThree people have died after a passenger train derailed near Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire following a night of thunderstorms and torrential rainfall.The three dead were the driver, conductor and a passenger. Six other people were taken to hospital for treatment. Their injuries are not believed to be serious. Continue reading...

Moves comes because people who may have recovered from virus before they died were still counted in total number

Methodology change brings England in line with rest of UK; pupils caught up in Glasgow coronavirus cluster

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya becomes the latest to crumble under government pressure

Man suspected of setting fire to car in Florida among trio charged by US federal prosecutors in singer’s sexual abuse caseFederal prosecutors announced charges on Wednesday against three men accused of threatening and intimidating women who have accused the R&B singer R Kelly of abuse, including one man suspected of setting fire to a vehicle in Florida.A longtime friend of the indicted singer offered to pay a victim $500,000 to keep her from cooperating in Kelly’s prosecution, authorities said, while a manager and adviser of Kelly threatened to release sexually explicit photographs of a woman who sued Kelly. Continue reading...

Raúl Castro in fact played a central role in shaping the revolution, making his 2008 election perfectly logical, write Prof Par Kumaraswami and Prof Antoni Kapcia

Boy, 17, killed Lindsay Birbeck, 47, after she went for a walk in woods near her homeA 17-year-old boy has been found guilty of the murder of a teaching assistant who was found buried in a shallow grave at the back of a cemetery after going on an afternoon walk.The body of Lindsay Birbeck, 47, a mother of two, was discovered wrapped in two plastic bags in Accrington cemetery in Lancashire on 24 August last year. Continue reading...

The Reclaim Her Name project, marking 25 years of the Women’s prize for fiction, will introduce titles including Middlemarch by Mary Ann Evans

Opposition leaders jailed or driven out of country amid crackdown on protests over election resultsAuthorities in Belarus say they have arrested more than 6,000 people during three nights of violently suppressed demonstrations against vote-rigging in Sunday’s disputed presidential election, as more footage and accounts emerged of police beating and violently detaining protesters.Opposition leaders have been jailed and driven out of the country in a massive crackdown following the election, which the election commission said was won in a landslide by President Alexander Lukashenko. Continue reading...

Four-year-old Amira is back with her parents – but challenges lie ahead for them and many other familiesFour-year-old Amira Hammoud used to love fireworks, asking her grandfather to set them off for her whenever he could. After the explosion that decimated Beirut last week, now even the sound of a fork clattering on the table is enough to make her scream with terror. Traumatised, she has become aggressive and clingy, refusing to let adults leave the room.But she has at least been reunited with her mother, Hiba, after seven days apart – a small blessing in the midst of Lebanon’s national tragedy. Continue reading...

Closely watched talks appear to be stalling as reported €10m offer is dismissedNamibia has rejected an German offer of compensation for the mass murder of tens of thousands of indigenous people more than a century ago.German occupiers in Namibia almost destroyed the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1908 as they consolidated their rule in the new colony in south-west Africa. Some historians have described the bloodshed as the first genocide of the 20th century. Continue reading...

New policy will rule out future loans and guarantees made through UK Export FinanceBoris Johnson is poised to sign off new rules barring the UK government’s chief foreign lender from offering financial support to foreign fossil fuel projects.The new policy, which could come as soon as this week, will rule out future loans and financial guarantees for polluting projects overseas through the UK’s export credit agency, UK Export Finance, just weeks after it agreed to a £1bn financial package to support work on a gas project in Mozambique. Continue reading...

Emergency services have been called to a major train derailment near Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, where smoke could be seen billowing from the track amid reports of an engine fire and serious injuries.Four passenger carriages came off the track at Carmont, just west of Stonehaven, as a Scotrail high-speed train travelled from Aberdeen to Glasgow Queen Street.About 30 emergency vehicles, including an air ambulance, were reported to be attending the scene, where some witnesses suggested on social media that the train had fallen down an embankment after running into a landslip

There’s nothing wrong with being proud of our national dishes, but focusing on cheese makes us look ridiculousThere are differing visions of Britain. You hear it in the way we talk about the second world war: the nation split into those who think we were fighting Nazis and those who think we were fighting Germans. Patriots have long looked at their country and cherrypicked the parts that appeal. To some, being British is about the armed forces and the royal family. To others, it is the BBC and the NHS. To Liz Truss, national identity seems to be largely about cheese.In 2014, Truss, then environment secretary, gave a mesmerising address to the Conservative party conference that must rank as one of the slowest speeches in modern political history. If you watch the video, everyone in it seems to be on a time delay, despite the fact they’re in the same room. But it isn’t just the awkward pauses, it’s also the tone: Truss delivering her early punchlines with the dreamy, otherworldly air of Mr Burns from The Simpsons that time he turned radioactive and kept appearing in the woods. If you judge the quality of a speech by how confused the applause is, this one takes some beating. Continue reading...

Netflix now accounts for quarter of all actors’ earnings as the Rock takes home biggest pay packet for second year runningDwayne Johnson, the wrestler turned actor formerly known as the Rock, has again topped Forbes’s list of the highest-paid actors having made an estimated $87.5m (£67m) in the fiscal year ending June 2020.Next on the list were Ryan Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg, with $71.5m and $58m respectively. Save for Johnson, the names mark a considerable contrast to those on last year’s top 10, which was dominated by the stars of the Marvel franchise. Continue reading...

Amid the coronavirus crisis, most countries avoided the rows and recriminations experienced in Britain

The Hong Kong pro-democracy figure and media mogul Jimmy Lai has received a hero’s welcome on return to his newspaper after his arrest on allegations of foreign collusion. Chinese state media labelled him a 'genuine traitor'. Lai, his sons, senior executives from his Next Digital media company and others including the activist Agnes Chow were detained under Beijing’s national security law on Monday. Hundreds of police officers raided the offices and newsroom of Apple Daily, the tabloid Lai founded, in a move decried as an assault on press freedom. Most of the 10 arrested were released on bail

Officers ‘could not have known Labour MP was black before they targeted car’

NDIS quality commission says Integrity Care SA is being banned for a number of contraventions following an investigation into the ‘appalling circumstances’ of Smith’s deathThe disability care provider for an Adelaide woman with cerebral palsy who died in “disgusting and degrading” conditions earlier this year has been banned from operating under the NDIS.The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission on Wednesday announced it was revoking the registration of the company responsible for caring for 54-year-old woman Anne Marie Smith before her death in what police described as deeply shocking conditions in April. Continue reading...

James Cleverly criticises ice-cream company for Twitter posts about Channel crossingsThe Conservative minister James Cleverly has criticised ice-cream company Ben & Jerry’s for “virtue signalling”, after the company spoke out on social media about the plight of migrants and refugees attempting to cross the Channel.The spat between the ice-cream manufacturer and the government began when the company’s social media team published a thread about migrants and refugees directed at the home secretary, Priti Patel. Starting “the real crisis is our lack of humanity for people fleeing war, climate change and torture”, the thread pulled together a series of facts and resources about asylum seekers. Continue reading...

Apple Daily founder and pro-democracy activist returns to office following arrest under national security lawThe Hong Kong pro-democracy figure and media mogul Jimmy Lai received a hero’s welcome as he returned to his newspaper after being arrested on allegations of foreign collusion, while Chinese state media labelled him a “genuine traitor”.Lai, his sons, senior executives from his Next Digital media company and others including the activist Agnes Chow were detained under Beijing’s national security law on Monday. Hundreds of police officers also raided the offices and newsroom of Apple Daily, the popular tabloid Lai founded, in a move decried as an assault on press freedom. Continue reading...

Informed by baile funk, metal and more, Linn da Quebrada and Jup do Bairro – with producer Badsista – are dodging racism, transphobia and music industry resistance to tell their own storiesJup do Bairro and Linn da Quebrada first met at a festival in São Paulo through mutual friends. It didn’t go well, Jup says while we wait for Linn to join our Zoom call. “I looked at her and joked: Is it Linn for linda?”, meaning beautiful in Portuguese. “I remember she rolled her eyes and I thought: Yikes, game over!”But the two musicians kept running into each other. “Linn often performed at the same parties I was invited to and since we both lived far from the city centre, we’d always wait for the bus together,” Jup says. In the end, they became close friends and eventually musical partners. Continue reading...

Royal commission hears hundreds of residents will die because of government failure to develop a coronavirus response plan, and that some care homes are cutting staff

NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian strongly encourages mask-wearing as Victoria’s hotel quarantine system goes under the microscope. Follow live updates today

Thunderstorm warnings in place for much of country as heatwave conditions continueThunderstorm warnings are still in place for most of the UK on Wednesday, while high temperatures are forecast again for many parts of England.The Met Office has issued a yellow storm warning for all of England and the eastern half of Scotland, and a more serious amber warning for eastern Scotland between Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen. Continue reading...

Fight to eradicate disease getting ‘back on track’ after surge in cases due to pause in vaccination campaignsPolio vaccination campaigns have resumed in Afghanistan and Pakistan – the last two polio-endemic countries in the world – after a “surge” in cases.The pandemic halted campaigns in both countries in March and confirmed cases have now reached 34 in Afghanistan and 63 in Pakistan – where cases are being recorded in areas of the country previously free of the disease. Continue reading...

Italy is facing an influx of people trafficked on fishing boats, desperate to escape Tunisia’s deepening economic crisisUnsurprisingly for a coastal town perched upon Tunisia’s border with Libya, it’s hot when Ahmed climbs into the back of the car outside the petrol station in Zarzis.It’s clear from the outset he feels uncomfortable talking to a journalist. Nevertheless, he’s here. Continue reading...

With access to information and the voting process remaining open, there is no reason to postpone the September poll because of Covid-19 outbreakThe reintroduction of lockdowns as a result of evidence of community transmission of Covid-19 in Auckland has New Zealand electoral politics in a bit of a tizz. The general election is due in only 38 days, overseas voting commences on 2 September and advance voting is scheduled to open three days later. On learning of the move to higher alert levels, most parties announced they were suspending their election campaigning, at least until midnight Friday or until the extent of the community transmission is understood.With luck, the outbreak will be able to be quickly contained, and election campaigning can resume. But this cannot be taken for granted, and already there is speculation about whether the 19 September general election will have to be deferred. On Wednesday, National leader Judith Collins called on Jacinda Ardern move the vote to November on the grounds that it would not be possible to have a fair and free election in September. She said that with Auckland in level 3 lockdown and the rest of the country at level 2, it was unsustainable to expect a fair campaign. She said New Zealanders deserved better than to wonder if they can vote on election day. Continue reading...

GDP falls 20.4% as coronavirus fuels biggest quarterly decline in growth since 1955

‘It’s the same every year. He talks gibberish and leaves,’ says one survivor after plagiarism app detects 93% match in speeches given days apartSurvivors of the atomic bombings of 75 years ago have accused Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, of making light of their concerns after he delivered two near-identical speeches to mark the anniversaries of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.A plagiarism detection app found that Abe’s speech in Nagasaki on Sunday duplicated 93% of a speech he had given in Hiroshima three days earlier, the Mainichi Shimbun reported. Continue reading...

Coronavirus restrictions have been reintroduced across New Zealand after four new Covid-19 cases were diagnosed in Auckland Continue reading...

Survivors who say alleged assailants go unpunished have begun publicly shaming them onlineEgypt is witnessing a wave of online outrage targeting rape culture and sexual assault, as survivors use social media to shame alleged abusers and demand change.A growing number of social media accounts gather survivors’ testimony and attempt to shame alleged attackers, angry at elite perpetrators they say routinely go unpunished. Continue reading...

A campaign has highlighted plight of unmarried couples from different countries parted for months

Anger has been building since 2014 coup in which prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha seized power, with students now holding rallies almost dailyThai protesters have broken a long-standing taboo, risking lengthy jail terms to criticise the king, after weeks of student-led pro-democracy rallies that have swept across the country.Over recent weeks, high school and university students have targeted the government of prime minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha, calling for its dissolution and for democratic reforms. Now, some protesters have begun openly criticising the country’s wealthy and powerful monarchy. Continue reading...

In the years since its launch party ended in violence, 66 Records survived a racist media storm to secure a major deal. Its bosses say nothing can stop them nowAt the September 2018 launch of Melbourne rap label 66 Records at the Gasometer Hotel in Collingwood, a heaving crowd bounced under the venue’s giant disco ball to booming bass. But that jubilation ended at about 2am when a fight broke out.The violence culminated in the street with one intoxicated attendee losing control of a car, pinning another teenager between two parked cars. The victim David Dada – a third cousin of the label’s founder Abraham Poni – lost his leg. Continue reading...

Fears Beijing would export its strict control of the media to Hong Kong have been borne out by arrest of pro-democracy media mogul and raid on his paper

Electoral commission assessing implications for September election, as Auckland placed on level 3 lockdown due to four new cases

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya left for Lithuania after election result prompted protest actionSvetlana Tikhanovskaya, the main opposition candidate in Sunday’s disputed elections in Belarus, has left the country after an apparent threat to her children.Opposition supporters took the streets of the capital, Minsk, and several other cities for the third night running on Tuesday despite a huge police crackdown as anger at the 26-year rule of president Alexander Lukashenko continued to grow. Continue reading...