World news | The Guardian

Monday: Australia’s offshore processing system on Nauru will cost taxpayers nearly $220m over the next six months. Plus: can a sick note make you better?Good morning. Australia’s offshore processing regime on Nauru will cost taxpayers nearly $220m over the next six months. Russia has sent troops close to Ukraine’s borders. And Google warns that an upcoming Australian court ruling could have “devastating impacts” on the internet.Australia’s offshore processing regime on Nauru will cost taxpayers nearly $220m over the next six months as it holds 107 people on the Pacific island. Brisbane firm Canstruct International has been awarded a new extension – its eighth non-competitive contract extension – for $218.5m to provide six months of “garrison and welfare services” on Nauru. The company’s total revenue from island contracts over the past five years now totals more than $1.8bn. It currently costs Australian taxpayers more than $4m a year to hold one person within the Nauru offshore regime – a little over $11,000 per person per day. Continue reading...

Gardaí attempting to establish at what point 66-year-old man died before alarm was raised at shop in CarlowPolice suspect that a dead man who was brought to a post office in Ireland by two men trying to claim his pension had died just hours before the incident.Gardaí have ruled out foul play, with a postmortem revealing he had died not long before the alarm was raised at Hosey’s shop and post office in the town of Carlow, in County Carlow. Continue reading...

Lawmakers and regional delegates will vote for successor to Sergio Mattarella, who steps down on 3 FebruaryItalian parliamentarians will begin casting their votes for a new president on Monday after the scandal-plagued Silvio Berlusconi abandoned his dream of becoming the next head of state.More than 1,000 lawmakers and regional delegates will participate in the complex secret ballot, described as being akin to the appointment of a new pope, that could go through several rounds before a successor to Sergio Mattarella, who is due to step down on 3 February, is elected. Continue reading...

Warning greeted with shock and some scepticism in Kyiv but aide says it fits ‘logical chain’Ukraine is reacting “seriously” to UK Foreign Office allegations that Moscow has plans to invade the country and install a puppet government, a senior government adviser has said, adding that Kyiv is resisting Russian efforts to destabilise its government and economy.The extraordinary Foreign Office claims that Moscow may topple the government and install Yevhen Murayev, a former MP who controls a pro-Russia television station, were met with shock and some scepticism in Ukrainian political and media circles on Sunday. Continue reading...

Deputy PM promises ‘full transparency’ but says it is for Boris Johnson to decide how much detail is released to the public

Former security and diplomatic chiefs warn that country is at risk of economic collapse as Taliban begin talks in NorwayAfghanistan can only be saved from state collapse and widespread starvation if the definition of legitimate humanitarian aid to the country is broadened, some of Britain’s most senior former security and diplomatic chiefs have said.The group, including two former national security advisers, a former chief of defence staff and a former ambassador to Afghanistan, write in a letter published in the Guardian that the aid that can be sent to the Taliban-controlled country without fear of sanctions is too restricted. Continue reading...

All summer we’ve seen the highly contagious Omicron variant rip through most of Australia, as a record number of people continue to get sick and die from the virus.Laura Murphy-Oates speaks to a paramedic and a senior ICU nurse, who say the health system is being pushed to the limitRead more: Continue reading...

Ex-minister says she was rebuffed after telling Boris Johnson she was told she lost job because of her faithThe row over Islamophobia gripping the government deepened on Sunday as the former minister Nusrat Ghani claimed the prime minister told her he “could not get involved” after she told him party whips had blamed her sacking on her “Muslimness”.Ghani’s claims have rocked the Tory party at a critical time for Boris Johnson, as he awaits a make-or-break inquiry into lockdown-flouting parties in Downing Street. Continue reading...

Monarch stayed at Windsor Castle over Christmas as a precautionary measure as Covid cases roseThe Queen has flown by helicopter from Windsor Castle to Sandringham where she will spend the next few weeks, it is understood.The monarch normally hosts her family at Sandringham over the holidays, and on Christmas Day the royals attend church nearby. Continue reading...

Crushing poverty is forcing starving displaced people to make desperate choicesThe temperature is dropping to below zero in western Afghanistan and Delaram Rahmati is struggling to find food for her eight children.Since leaving the family home in the country’s Badghis province four years ago, the Rahmatis have been living in a mud hut with a plastic roof in one of Herat city’s slums. Drought made their village unliveable and the land unworkable. Like an estimated 3.5 million Afghans who have been forced to leave their homes, the Rahmatis now live in a neighbourhood for internally displaced people (IDP). Continue reading...

The case is the first involving a hamster in the care of an owner following pet shop outbreakA hamster surrendered to authorities by its owners has tested positive for Covid-19 and more than 2,200 hamsters have been culled, Hong Kong officials have said, as the city grapples to contain an outbreak of the virus.On Tuesday officials ordered the killing of hamsters from dozens of pet shops after tracing a Covid-19 outbreak to a worker and asked people to surrender any of the animals bought on or after 22 December. Continue reading...

The most satisfying lives are those which involve challenge, fear and struggle, says psychologist Paul BloomThe simplest theory of human nature is hedonism– – we pursue pleasure and comfort. Suffering and pain are, by their very nature, to be avoided. The spirit of this view is nicely captured in The Epic of Gilgamesh: “Let your belly be full, enjoy yourself always by day and by night! Make merry each day, dance and play day and night… For such is the destiny of men.” And also by the Canadian rock band Trooper: “We’re here for a good time / Not a long time / So have a good time / The sun can’t shine every day.”Hedonists wouldn’t deny that life is full of voluntary suffering – we wake up in the middle of the night to feed the baby, take the 8.15 into the city, undergo painful medical procedures. But for the hedonist, these unpleasant acts are seen as the costs that must be paid to obtain greater pleasures in the future. Challenging and difficult work is the ticket to survival and status; boring exercise and unpleasant diets are what you have to go through for abs of steel and a vibrant old age, and so on. Continue reading...

Dutch military police say man taken to hospital and that his age and nationality have not yet been determinedA stowaway was discovered in the wheel section under the front of a freight plane that arrived at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport from South Africa on Sunday, Dutch military police have said.“The man is doing well considering the circumstances and has been taken to a hospital,” the police in charge of Dutch border control said in a statement. Continue reading...

Bloc would unify to respond within days, says official on eve of foreign ministers’ meetingThe EU will be ready to launch sanctions against Russia within days of a military attack on Ukraine, a senior official has said, as the volatile security crisis enters a critical phase.EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday are expected to issue a further warning to Moscow amid simmering tensions over Russia’s buildup of 100,000 troops and heavy weapons along its border with Ukraine. Continue reading...

In the city’s favelas, a new generation of ‘narco-pentecostals’ are embracing Christian symbols“Pastor, do you think we could hold a service at my house next Thursday?” the peroxide-haired gangster wondered, cradling an AK-47 in his lap as he took a seat beside the man of God.A few months earlier, the 23-year-old had bought his first home with the fruits of his illegal work as a footsoldier for one of Rio de Janeiro’s drug factions. Now, he wanted to give thanks for the blessings he believed he had received from above. Continue reading...

Kay-Achim Schönbach said it was ‘nonsense’ that Russia wanted to invade its neighbour and that Kyiv would never win back CrimeaThe chief of Germany’s navy has resigned after arguing at a livestreamed event that Putin “deserves respect” and Kyiv will never ever win back annexed Crimea – comments that Ukraine’s ambassador in Berlin said “massively” called into question Germany’s trustworthiness.Vice-admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, who has led Germany’s entire naval force and represented it externally since March 2020, made his comments at a talk organised by a thinktank in Delhi on Friday. Continue reading...

Thirty years ago, Jay Rayner sat down for lunch with a Holocaust denier and rising star of the far right. So how did Ewald Althans end up working in the arts and marrying his Taiwanese boyfriend?I sent Ewald Althans a message suggesting we meet in a coffee shop, not far from my East Berlin hotel. I thought it might be a more relaxed place in which to talk. He declined. “I do not feel too comfy any more sitting in a cosy place having an intense talk about National Socialism, Hitler, Auschwitz, etc,” he texted back. “I suggest we have a nice long walk.” I felt terribly naïve. After all, he had a point. Sitting in a Berlin coffee shop, chatting openly about the Nazis, really might not be the best way to go. I agreed to wait for him at the hotel. It required patience; he sent me repeated messages apologising for being late. “No worries,” I replied. “It’s been 29 years since we last met. I can wait another hour.”Despite both the three decades that had passed and the Covid mask, I recognised him immediately. He wore drainpipe jeans ripped at the knee instead of an expensive sculpted suit, and his once straw-blond hair was now grey. Nevertheless, it was still recognisably him: the man once tipped to lead Germany to a new fascist glory. We turned out of the hotel and began to stroll down one of Berlin’s sun-dappled, tree-lined avenues. “So,” I said, “You’re no longer a neo-Nazi then?” He laughed, but did not answer. Perhaps he didn’t consider it a question deserving of a response. Continue reading...

All residents of Fengtai district told to get nucleic acid tests as China’s capital rushes to contain Omicron outbreak

Thirty years after his death, the rich life of the Spanish Gypsy singer is depicted through 10 illustrated episodesIn death, as in life, the legendary flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla continues to confound expectations, cross borders and demand that his blistered and blistering voice be heard.The revered, beloved and sometimes controversial cantaor died of lung cancer in July 1992, aged just 41. But as the 30th anniversary of his death looms, the singer born José Monge Cruz is being reincarnated in the black-and-white pages of a new graphic novel intended as a homage to Camarón, the music he created and the comic book itself. Continue reading...

Ninety wait for justice as infection controls prevent juries from sitting for two yearsSt Lucia has not been able to hold a homicide trial for two years, because courtrooms are too small to safely seat a jury under Covid rules, the Caribbean nation’s director of public prosecutions has said.The build-up of untried cases is one of the most extreme examples of the damaging impact of the pandemic on access to justice globally. Rule of law has deteriorated around the world, the World Justice Project found. Three-quarters of the countries evaluated for its Rule of Law Index experienced a decline in 2021. Continue reading...

Chair of parliamentary group says such games are too much like gambling-industry products linked to problem bettingBritain’s lottery operator should be banned from using the national lottery brand and logo to promote online instant-win games that may lead to problem gambling, according to the chair of a group of MPs examining gambling harms.Carolyn Harris, the Labour MP and chair of the all party parliamentary group for gambling-related harm, said the online games now offered by the lottery operator, Camelot, were similar to harmful betting products promoted by the gambling industry. They also give a smaller proportion of revenues to good causes compared with the draw-based games. Continue reading...

Seminal work by scholar and future politician Eric Williams, shunned for decades, is issued by mainstream imprintIn 1938, a brilliant young Black scholar at Oxford University wrote a thesis on the economic history of British empire and challenged a claim about slavery that had been defining Britain’s role in the world for more than a century.But when Eric Williams – who would later become the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago – sought to publish his “mind-blowing” thesis on capitalism and slavery in Britain, he was shunned by publishers and accused of undermining the humanitarian motivation for Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act. Continue reading...

Pamphlets attacked the president and foreign ministerShocking new details have emerged of Britain’s role in one of the most brutal massacres of the postwar 20th century.Last year the Observer revealed how British officials secretly deployed black propaganda in the 1960s to incite prominent Indonesians to “cut out” the “communist cancer”. Continue reading...

The fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday reminds us that history and geography mean that now, as then, the fates of the two countries are entwinedAlmost 50 years ago, in the early hours of 2 February 1972, the British embassy in Dublin was gutted by fire. This was not an accident. A huge crowd had gathered in protest outside the lovely Georgian terrace in Merrion Square all through the previous day. They cheered as young men climbed across the balconies and smashed a window. They threw in some petrol and lit it. A fusillade of petrol bombs was unleashed from the crowd. People chanted the slogan they had learned from the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965: burn, baby, burn. The police did nothing to stop the attack.I was 14 at the time, so I wasn’t there. But some of my older friends were and I wished I had been with them. The assault was organised by the IRA, but most ordinary, peaceful Irish people approved of it. It seemed like the right thing to do, a reasonable response to the massacre the previous weekend in Derry of 13 unarmed civilians by the first battalion of the British army’s Parachute Regiment. A woman waiting for a bus in Dublin told the Irish Times: “I felt outraged that the British should do this and I felt that whatever the rights and wrongs, they would know how we felt when we burned down their embassy.” Continue reading...

Trust chiefs hold conflicting views over compulsory vaccinations, which look set to put staffing of health service under even more pressure

Head of the continent’s disease control centre says doctors and nurses are needed to bolster the local pandemic response

With negotiations deadlocked, Moscow is continuing to build up its military forces for a possible invasionRussia has sent troops more than 4,000 miles to Ukraine’s borders and announced sweeping naval drills as Moscow expands its preparations for a potential attack on Ukraine as negotiations appear at a deadlock.Six Russian landing ships capable of carrying main main battle tanks, troops and other military vehicles travelled through the Channel en route to the Mediterranean last week in a deployment that could bolster an amphibious landing on Ukraine’s southern coast if Vladimir Putin orders an attack. Ukraine’s military intelligence has claimed that Russia is hiring mercenaries and supplying its proxy forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions with fuel, tanks and self-propelled artillery in preparation for a potential upsurge in fighting. Continue reading...

As people in England are told to return to the office, five Observer writers assess the impact of the last two years on work, home – and our wider social frameworkI’ve read and thought more about office life over the last two years than I have at any time over the previous two decades when I worked in one. I say worked, but of course from this distance I can see that what I called office work might not quite stand up in a court of law, being comprised of equal amounts gossip, tea-runs and shouting passive aggressively at computers, alongside the clattery typing I am paid for. Continue reading...

Monika was too busy with her young family to join the early protests against Poland’s strict abortion laws. But when she became pregnant with her fourth child, she realised she had to act

As new laws hit the most vulnerable pregnant women in need of care, volunteers struggle to help those unable to access safe abortions

Campaigners say compulsory menu labelling could put too much emphasis on calorie countingA Big Mac has 508. Wagamama’s hot chicken katsu curry has 1,089. And a large mixed grill with chips at Wetherspoon’s has 2,052. But will knowing how many calories are in a restaurant meal help make a difference to the UK’s obesity epidemic?From April, all cafes and restaurants run by companies with more than 250 staff will be obliged to include calorie counts for each item on their menus. The government hopes this will encourage people to make healthier choices and nudge restaurants towards offering healthier options. Continue reading...

Tory MPs, ministers and Downing St staff divided on whether to back prime minister, ahead of findings on lockdown breachesEarly last week a call came into the office of a senior cabinet minister from one of Boris Johnson’s team at Downing Street. No 10 was frantically lodging requests across departments for members of the government to go on the media the following morning to defend the prime minister – and face the inevitable barrage of near-impossible questions about “partygate”.Texts were exchanged. Agonised faces were pulled. Would it be a good idea? What was to be gained for the minister concerned? Was it just a hospital pass that required a decent excuse? In the end, a judgment was reached by the minister’s closest officials. “We have to do it, don’t we?” one said. “If we say no it will be a declaration of fucking war.” Continue reading...

Prime minister says variant is now circulating in the community but ‘we’ll do everything that we can to slow the spread’

Caitríona Balfe is the luminous star of Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-tipped Belfast. She talks about how modelling almost broke her, bonding on set with Judi Dench and her childhood during the TroublesCaitríona Balfe can remember the exact moment she realised she was done with being a model. It was the mid-2000s and Balfe was 27-ish, she thinks. It had been almost a decade since she’d been scouted in a Dublin supermarket while rattling a tin for a multiple sclerosis charity. She had done pretty well, walking in runway shows for Louis Vuitton and Chanel, flitting between Paris, Milan and New York. Balfe and her friends called themselves “the blue-collar models” – they weren’t the 0.1% of supermodels, the household names, but the next rung down.Now, though, Balfe was in Dallas, doing a well-paid but soulless shoot for a catalogue. After each set-up, a producer would ping a little bell to indicate they needed to fast-change to the next outfit. At her age, in that youth-fixated business, Balfe knew the clock was ticking. She’d handled just about as much blunt rejection as she could take for one lifetime. “The shows were fun and exciting, but with catalogues, you’re just standing there like a clothes horse – literally,” says Balfe. “And you know, ‘This is not what I want to be doing with my life.’ Continue reading...

With an exhibition featuring unseen photos of the singer opening in London, his son talks about his father’s passion for sport – and the night he was shotZiggy Marley was only eight years old when his mum and dad – the reggae great Bob Marley – were shot in an apparent assassination attempt inside their home in Kingston, Jamaica. But he remembers it like yesterday.“Cops came for us children in the middle of the night and carried us away to a secret hideaway up in the hills – no one really knew what was happening. It was scary but it was kind of exciting,” he says. Continue reading...

Diplomatic talks calm tensions for now but Europe is left looking feeble and irrelevantTalks about the Ukraine crisis between senior US and Russian diplomats, held in Geneva at the end of last week, appear to have calmed tensions, at least for now. The situation on Ukraine’s land and sea borders, where Moscow has amassed troops and powerful military assets, remains grave. But alarmist predictions of imminent, large-scale conflict have proved wide of the mark.The dogged insistence of Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, on pursuing diplomatic means to address Russia’s security concerns clearly made an impression on his notoriously intransigent opposite number, Sergei Lavrov. Russia’s foreign minister said the talks had been “constructive and useful” and agreed to continue them this week. Continue reading...

Students and teachers in NSW will be required to take rapid Covid tests twice a week when school resumes; Victoria mandates third vaccine dose for teachers and staff, masks for year three and above; NSW records 34 Covid deaths, Victoria 14 and Queensland 10; ACT reports 694 cases and no deaths, SA 2,062 cases, WA 24 as health minister signals move to ‘suppression’ strategy. This blog is now closed

CDC director stresses need for full vaccination as data shows vulnerabilty of those without and ER backlogs stretch for hoursThe surge in cases of the Omicron variant has not only swamped US hospitals with record numbers of patients with Covid-19, it has also caused frightening moments and major challenges for people seeking treatment for other problems.Less-urgent procedures have been put on hold. Emergency room waits are stretching hours longer than usual. Continue reading...

Matt Johnson conducted an undercover exposé of cruel practices used to mass exterminate pigs at Iowa Select Farms facilities

Be interested, not in your lover, but in your longing and how it came into being, says Philippa Perry. And develop appreciation for what you haveThe question I had a very intense two-year affair with someone who, like me, had long been married. Eighteen months in, I left my wife, feeling sure my affair partner was the love of my life, and in the hope it might lead to us being together. This led to the loss of my home and much of my social network, and the need to change jobs.My affair partner decided to stay in her marriage, citing the wellbeing of her children. She wanted to keep the relationship with me going indefinitely in secret. This rapidly became unbearable to me and I have now cut off all contact, which was not her wish. She was evasive about whether she intended, or even wanted, to leave her marriage and be with me openly. Her final message to me expressed that this was now her intention, but that she could give no sense of a timescale. Continue reading...

In his new book, Quinones investigates how the explosion of synthetic drugs spurred an ‘epidemic of addiction’For the last nine years, Sam Quinones has been studying the changing face of drug use, sales, and addiction in the United States.In his new book The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, he tracks the explosion of synthetic drugs that has hit the streets of America, increasing the danger of drug use and making addictive chemical substances far cheaper and more plentiful than ever before. Continue reading...

A must-have for today’s musicians, actors and models, the hot trend for opera gloves harks back to Hollywood’s golden eraThe gen-Z demographic who use TikTok may be too young to remember a time before smartphones, but one of the most popular fashion trends on the app harks back to a bygone era. Opera gloves – as worn by screen stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Rita Hayworth – are taking off. Videos with the hashtag have had 275,000 views on TikTok. According to a study carried out by Clothes2Order, that represents a Google search increase of 84% in the second half of 2021.The surging interest in a clothing item that would once have been worn to an elite cultural event, the opera, has been repurposed over the years and is now being sported by popular musicians and actors. Adele, Olivia Rodrigo and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion have worn them in videos, while Julia Fox and Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney have worn them to events. The red carpet at the Fashion Awards in December saw attenders get behind the trend – Demi Moore, Alexa Chung and Kristen McMenamy wore opera gloves. Beyoncé, meanwhile, has made them something of a signature. At the Grammys last year, she sported leather opera gloves with matching dress. Continue reading...

Sedef Kabaş faces imprisonment for saying a proverb, with colleagues condemning arrest as attempt to intimidate mediaA prominent Turkish TV journalist has been detained and could face imprisonment after being charged with insulting the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.Police detained Sedef Kabaş at her home at 2am on Saturday and took her to a police station, before she faced court and was jailed pending a trial. Continue reading...

Jean-Jacques Savin, a former paratrooper, wanted ‘to laugh at old age’ but got into difficulties off the AzoresA 75-year-old Frenchman attempting to row across the Atlantic “to laugh at old age” has been found dead in his cabin at sea, his support team said.Portuguese coast guards found Jean-Jacques Savin’s overturned boat off the archipelago of the Azores on Friday. Continue reading...

West Australian capital also setting records for most days above 40C in a summer with the tally now at 10 days

Thompson gives an emotionally generous performance as a former teacher seeking sexual gratification in an amusing and compassionate two-handerEmma Thompson gives us a very personal, emotionally generous and intimate performance in this entertaining theatrical two-hander from screenwriter Katy Brand and director Sophie Hyde. Despite some moments of sentimentality and naivety, it is really watchable and conceived with a flair for commanding the audience’s attention. It’s not exactly right to call it a crowd-pleaser, but Brand – who has her own record in comedy writing and performance – has a comic’s sense of how and where to elicit an audience response.Thompson plays Nancy, a middle-aged widow and former RE teacher who after a lifetime of unsatisfying conjugal relations with just the one man (her late husband) has decided to pay for discreet afternoon sex in an upmarket Norwich hotel room.

Beijing government says officials in Henan province were found to have deliberately underreported the disasterOfficials in a Chinese province deliberately underreported or concealed 139 deaths from last year’s devastating flood disaster, the country’s central government has said, amid arrests of some of those involved.Record-breaking rainstorms hit Henan province in central China between 17 and 23 July, overflowing reservoirs, breaching riverbanks, and overwhelming public transport systems and roads in major cities. In the city of Zhengzhou, more than 600mm of rain, equivalent almost to an average year, fell in just three days, flooding metro stations and a cross-city tunnel. Continue reading...

Mark Spencer says accusations are ‘completely false’ after Nusrat Ghani says she was told her faith made colleagues ‘uncomfortable’Mark Spencer, the chief whip, has said a Conservative MP was referring to him when she accused a member of government of telling her she had been sacked from her ministerial post because her Muslim faith was “making colleagues uncomfortable”.Boris Johnson faces calls for an inquiry into Nusrat Ghani’s claim in an interview with the Sunday Times that, when she lost her job as a transport minister, she was told that “Muslimness” had been raised as an problem at a meeting in Downing Street. Continue reading...

A Senegalese immigrant nanny battles micro-aggressions and otherworldly forces in a novel yet loosely assembled debutIt’s remarkable how infrequently modern-day domestic workers are portrayed as fully formed characters in TV and film, given their ubiquity and necessity in the lives of so many. Perhaps part of that is because “the help” isn’t meant to be noticed (the flamboyant Fran Fine notwithstanding) or that the lives of low-wage people of color, many of whom are immigrants, haven’t traditionally piqued the interest of privileged Hollywood. When domestic workers do see screen time, it’s often through the gaze of the privileged.Enter film-maker ​​Nikyatu Jusu, whose mother, an immigrant from Sierra Leone, had been a domestic worker. Raised in Atlanta, the young Jusu watched her parent “put her dreams to the side to be a peripheral mother in other mother’s narratives”.Nanny is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced Continue reading...

Singer extends apologies and tears by FaceTime and social media after Covid delays to her residency datesAdele has personally apologised to fans after cancelling a series of highly anticipated shows in Las Vegas because of Covid production issues.The singer addressed disappointed concert-goers, some of who had travelled in from around the world, via FaceTime after her residency was postponed at the last minute. Continue reading...