Labour seeks review after police and RSPB link sharp rise in killings to hunting season

The conclusion of this two-part documentary charted the end of the Soviet Union to the Clinton years and beyond, with the former US president joining a superb cast of talking headsIt’s been so long since I experienced it – either personally or simply as a possibility in the wider world – that for a minute or two I couldn’t identify the feeling that arrived as Cuba: Castro vs the World (BBC Two) concluded. It was, I realised after rummaging through distant memory, the sense of having become better informed about some aspect of the world rather than even more flailingly confused about it.The two-hour film, produced by Norma Percy (The Death of Yugoslavia, Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil) traced the history of Cuba from 1959, when “the bearded men from the mountains” – led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara – vanquished US-backed military dictator Fulgencio Batista and began a revolution that would prove it is not the size of your country that matters, it’s what you do with it. Continue reading...

Wednesday: medical experts say NSW needs tighter restrictions on indoor gatherings as clusters grow. Plus, Harris makes history as Biden’s running mateGood morning, this is Emilie Gramenz bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 12 August. Continue reading...

Convicting all the suspects would also have offered the police a measure of redemption​Convicting all of the suspects in the racist gang of five or six people that killed Stephen Lawrence would have delivered justice for his family, and some measure of redemption for the Metropolitan police. Scotland Yard’s decision to close the case means neither will get what they longed for.For Doreen and Neville Lawrence the loss of their first child, Stephen, was a personal catastrophe that over the years turned into a symbolic case for the nation, and remains so. Continue reading...

Live footage of people crossing Channel to UK is like ‘grotesque reality TV’, says MP

Many have taken jobs in new industries, while others are underemployed and struggling with bills

Many in Lebanon hope a new government of national unity will pave the way for reform after last week’s explosionIn the wake of Lebanese prime minister Hassan Diab’s announcement that his government will resign, the country has been left wondering whether the explosion that decimated Beirut is also strong enough to uproot Lebanon’s rotten political system.In a televised address on Monday night after more than a third of ministers quit their posts, forcing him to do the same, Diab said that the corruption of the country’s entrenched ruling class “created this tragedy” but avoided taking personal responsibility. Continue reading...

The overarching project of my life has been making myself safe. But what is the point if everyone else is drowning and burning and starving?

Almost three-quarters back Daniel Andrews’ public health measures, but premier’s approval rating stagnates while Morrison’s is buoyedThe lockdown might be draconian, but Victorians overwhelmingly support the public health restrictions imposed to curb the second wave of coronavirus infections, with support for the measures highest among voters aged over 55, according to a Guardian Essential poll.New research shows 72% of the sample backs the decision of the Andrews government to impose a curfew between 8pm and 5am, 71% supports curbs on leaving the house, while 70% endorse restrictions on business and the requirement that people travel no further than 5km from their house. Voters aged over 34 are more likely to support the current lockdown measures than younger people. Continue reading...

Without a radical overhaul the next government could look like the one that resignedLike a break in a merciless heatwave, the fall of Lebanon’s failed government has reduced by a few degrees the political temperature in the country’s towns and cities. One week after the enormous explosion that levelled much of Beirut, its rulers have rightly paid a price. The power of the street had exposed the fragility of Lebanese leaders. Impunity hadn’t won the day after all.But what seemed like much needed relief is more likely to be the start of a familiar pattern; the same line up of ministers who quit in disgrace will now take on a caretaker role, while those who really control the country haggle over the next incarnation of a government that is likely to look very similar to the one that has just resigned. Continue reading...

All teacher-awarded grades to be reinstated as pressure grows in England; Scottish football games axed after lockdown breaches

Met police chief announces there are no further lines of inquiry into murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993The father of Stephen Lawrence will attempt to overturn a decision by Scotland Yard to end the active hunt for his son’s murderers, saying it would leave racist killers out on the streets.Neville Lawrence was speaking after the Metropolitan police shifted the status of its search for at least three white men who were part of the gang that attacked Stephen, saying active work to catch them would cease. He and his ex-wife, Doreen, Stephen’s mother, expressed dismay at the decision. Continue reading...

Alexander Lukashenko has cut off entire population’s internet to try to stifle election dissent

Aleksandar Antonov says he made remarks about footballer in a private group chat

Readers share their views on the UK government’s response to Channel migrant crossings

New infections nearly back to peak in Netherlands as France reports ‘worrying increase’

Britain's minister for immigration compliance, Chris Philp, says the Channel will be made completely 'unviable' for people attempting to make illegal crossings from France into the UK. Speaking in Paris, Philp said the route was facilitated by 'ruthless criminal gangs' and that the UK and France shared an 'unshakeable' commitment to making sure illegal crossings end as soon as possible

Experts offer other options as UK government seeks to reduce numbers crossing in boats

Sputnik V’s development has been marked by worrying opacity and ethical issues

No, it’s not a careless whisper: a nine-metre-high image of the singer, by artist Dawn Mellor, is set to adorn BrentTurn a different corner in the London borough of Brent from September and you’ll be confronted with the strangest thing: a nine-metre mural of local hero George Michael.No this isn’t just a careless whisper. British artist Dawn Mellor has been commissioned to paint a permanent public artwork in Kingsbury, celebrating the life of the singer, who grew up in the area. Continue reading...

Nigel Wright, 45, from Lincolnshire, allegedly claimed to have planted jars laced with metal in numerous storesA sheep farmer allegedly tried to extort cryptocurrency from Tesco in exchange for revealing in which of its stores he had planted jars of baby food laced with metal, a court has heard.Nigel Wright, 45, from Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, is accused of bombarding the supermarket chain with letters and emails in the name of “Guy Brush” between May 2018 and February 2020. Continue reading...

Police seize drugs valued at up to €6m and arrest at least 17 suspects at stablesAt least 17 people are in custody in the Netherlands after police raided a former riding stables that had been transformed into the country’s largest ever illicit drugs “laundry” capable of producing up to 200kg of cocaine a day.Thirteen of those detained were Colombian nationals, police said on Tuesday. Three Dutch citizens – including the 64-year-old owner of the stables, in the northern village of Nijeveen – and one Turkish suspect were also arrested. Continue reading...

Pair believed to have been using inflatable dinghy seen drifting out at sea

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the main opposition candidate in Belarus' disputed elections, is thought to have left the country for Lithuania as clashes between heavily armed police and demonstrators escalated during a second night of protests follow re-election of longtime ruler Alexander Lukashenko.In an emotional video posted to social media, Tikhanovskaya indicated she had faced an ultimatum and urged people to 'please be careful' adding that 'children are the most important part of our lives'.Lithuania’s foreign minister, Linas Linkevičius, told the Guardian that Tikhanovskay had been detained by Belarusian authorities for seven hours after filing a complaint against vote-rigging

War Office feared war movie would ‘not go down well with British public’The adventure war film The Bridge on the River Kwai may have swept the board of awards and attracted acclaim as one best films of the 20th century, but the War Office was very nervous “it would not go down well with the British public”, documents reveal.Letters between the Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel and the UK War Office, from whom he was seeking permission for RAF cooperation in making the 1957 film, show tensions over how its plot depicted the conduct of British officers. Continue reading...

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