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As the Roy siblings strategise their next moves, get one step ahead with our at-a-glance stats of their potential for success (or, more likely, disaster)
Continue reading...To disrupt colonial power inequalities, the global south needs to take more control
There have been many studies published recently on the prevalence of racism in the international aid sector.
They have ranged from definitions of racial equity within global development, to the experiences of black, indigenous and other people of colour working in the sector, to the British government’s delayed sub-inquiry into racism as part of a larger inquiry into the culture and philosophy of UK aid.
Continue reading...Residents grapple with damaged buildings and widespread power outages – but find reasons to be thankful
As the sun rose over the city of New Orleans, the streets quiet but for the crunch of detritus under foot, residents in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward awoke to assess the damage.
This neighbourhood bore some of the worst scars of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when New Orleans’s levee system failed and submerged the Lower Ninth in a storey of water, sweeping away lives and livelihoods.
Continue reading...The medical startup CEO is charged with six counts of fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison
The first phase of the trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will start on Tuesday, with jury selection scheduled in a San Jose, California, courthouse.
Holmes is charged with six counts of fraud relating to her now-defunct medical startup. The company, founded in 2003, claimed it would revolutionize the medical testing space with a new blood diagnostic technology that could perform a range of tests on a small dose of blood. The claims were later revealed to be largely fabricated.
Continue reading...They brawled with the Sex Pistols, gaffer-taped a journalist to the Eiffel Tower and got thrown out of Sweden twice. Now, for their 18th album and final tour, the punks seem to be maturing at last
As Jean-Jacques Burnel drily admits, the Stranglers had “a bad reputation for quite a while”. During the punk years, their many outrages ranged from being escorted out of Sweden by police with machine-guns (twice) to gaffer-taping a music journalist to the Eiffel Tower, 400ft up, upside down, without his trousers. However, the singer and bass player says the biggest outcry actually came when they got themselves a keyboard player.
“It was seen as sacrilege,” he laughs, recalling this supposed affront to the ramshackle garage punk ethos. “And worse than that – he had a synthesiser. We were called heretics and ostracised. Nobody wanted anything to to do with us. But look what happened a couple of years later: synth pop!”
Continue reading...Were any of us really ready for the news that we would bleed each month? Only one reaction made sense. Destroy all the sanitary towels
Let me take you back to south-west London circa 1988. Eddi Reader singing, “It’s got to be-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee perrrrrrrr-fect” on the radio and Margaret Thatcher in No 10 for all eternity. A time when internalised misogyny is so deeply internalised that no one knows it exists. I’m nine-ish, sporting a dark-blue checked dress and a nonchalant expression – and at school we’re learning about periods.
By this point, everything I know about menstruation, nay life, probably comes from the author Judy Blume. My best friend Galia and I start writing letters to one another that begin “Are You There God? It’s Me, CHITRA!” In a few years copies of Forever will be traded in the playground with a vigour currently only applied to Garbage Pail Kids cards. It’s a difficult period (the other kind). I’m one of those children who loves being a child and – spoiler alert – will turn into an adult who, in fundamental ways, remains one. I’m deeply unhappy about the dark hair sprouting in places I don’t want to know about and the budding discs of tenderness in my chest. The word puberty makes me dissolve into giggles or pull faces. Time, as far as I’m concerned, can be rewound as easily as a pencil inserted into a C-90 cassette tape. I don’t want to grow up.
Continue reading...Baseball caps and bucket hats used to be about accessibility. But a new school of wearers are using them to express something about themselves
Spotting a man wearing a baseball cap that featured only the name Rachel Cusk, the British author beloved of LRB subscribers, stopped me mid-scroll. A cultural commentator I follow had posted a selfie to his Instagram feed saying: “Copped the hottest hat.”
Continue reading...Drop in New Zealand cases is ‘reassuring indication’ lockdown is working, country’s director-general of health says, Japan says it’s likely that Moderna vaccines were contaminated when needles were stuck into vials
Japan’s health minister says it is highly likely that foreign matter found in Moderna Inc Covid-19 vaccines in the southern prefecture of Okinawa got into vials when needles were stuck in, Reuters reports.
Some Moderna shots were temporarily halted in Okinawa on Sunday after foreign materials were discovered in vials and syringes. The health ministry said later needles may have been incorrectly inserted into vials, breaking off bits of the rubber stopper.
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s rolling coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Livingstone.
New cases of Covid-19 have continued to drop in New Zealand, in a promising early indication that the country’s strict lockdown is working and its latest outbreak may be coming under control. The country reported 49 new cases on Tuesday, down from 53 a day earlier.
Continue reading...The C.1.2 strain has scientists’ attention because it possesses mutations within the genome similar to those seen in variants of interest, like Delta
A new Covid variant detected in South Africa has made headlines around the world.
On Monday the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa issued an alert about the ‘C.1.2 lineage’, saying it had been detected in all provinces in the country, but at relatively low rate.
Continue reading...As the German chancellor prepares to leave office, it is clear her long leadership has had one key central theme
As Maren Heinzerling crossed hands with the most powerful woman in the world, leaned backwards and started to spin her dance partner in a circle, she began to worry.
“What are you doing,” the retired railway engineer recalled thinking. “You are spinning around the room with Angela Merkel.” Heinzerling had to grip the chancellor’s hands tighter as they span faster with each rotation.
Continue reading...In 2008, many of Barack Obama’s supporters hoped he would bring the global war on terror to a close. Instead, he expanded it – and his successors have done nothing to change course
On 23 May 2013, the peace activist Medea Benjamin attended a speech by President Barack Obama at Fort McNair in Washington DC, where he defended his administration’s use of armed drones in counter-terrorism. During his speech, Benjamin interrupted the president to criticise him for not having closed Guantánamo Bay and for pursuing military solutions over diplomatic ones. She was swiftly ejected by military police and the Secret Service. The Washington Post later dismissed her as a “heckler”. Obama himself had been more reflective at the event, engaging with her criticisms, which led to even deeper self-criticism of his own. It was the moment of greatest moral clarity about war during a presidency that did more than any other to bring its endless and humane American form fully into being.
For all its routine violence, the American way of war is more and more defined by a near complete immunity from harm for the American side and unprecedented care when it comes to killing people on the other. Today, there are more and more legal obligations to make war more humane – meaning, above all, the aim of minimising collateral harm. Countries like the US have agreed to obey those obligations, however permissively they interpret them and inadequately apply them in the field. Absolutely and relatively, fewer captives are mistreated and fewer civilians die than in the past. Yet, at the same time, the US’s military operations have become more expansive in scope and perpetual in time by virtue of these very facts.
Continue reading...Bit to catch up on from this morning, with Australian Darren Hicks adding a Paralympic road cycling gold to track silver medal. He was pretty emotional afterwards but managed to articulate a message for his wife Carys who was watching on back at home.
“Sorry I stressed you out babe, but we got there,” he told the Seven Network. “I think I’ll be excited later, but for now it’s relief. I’ve worked so hard for this and wanted it for so long… I’m just so happy.
Related: Darren Hicks adds Paralympic road cycling gold to track silver medal
Hello and welcome to day seven of the Tokyo Paralympics. Tokyo is again hot and humid, and again there are a stack of medals to be won. Here are a few highlights coming our way, courtesy of my colleague Martin Belam.
All events are listed here in local Tokyo time. Add an hour for Sydney, subtract eight hours for Wolverhampton, 13 hours for New York and 16 hours for San Francisco.
Continue reading...The 34 outlets catering to students at four universities will offer only a single meat option four days a week
Students at universities in Berlin will from this winter swap currywurst and schnitzel for seeds and pulses, as campus canteens in the German capital make heavy cuts to their meat and fish options.
The 34 canteens and cafes catering to Berlin’s sizeable student population at four different universities will offer from October a menu that is 68% vegan, 28% vegetarian, and 2% fish-based, with a single meat option offered four days a week.
Continue reading...Director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said virus’ reproduction rate remained under one, meaning cases would continue to drop
New cases of Covid-19 have continued to drop in New Zealand, in a promising early indication that the country’s strict lockdown is working and its latest outbreak may be coming under control.
The country announced 49 new cases on Tuesday – dropping for the second day in a row, down from 53 cases on Monday and 83 on Sunday. It is the lowest number of new cases reported in the country in six days.
Continue reading...Carmel Sepuloni said she would ‘never buy the odd shaped carrot pack again’ after ‘almost wrestling’ with son over vegetable
A New Zealand cabinet minister has become the latest public figure to be embarrassed by an unfortunate incident involving a video call after her live TV interview was interrupted by her son, who entered the room excitedly brandishing a phallic carrot.
Carmel Sepuloni, the minister for social development, was doing a live Zoom interview with Radio Samoa when her grinning son burst through the door behind her, holding an oddly shaped carrot he’d apparently found among the groceries.
Continue reading...Floods came after unexpectedly heavy rains, with as much as 90mm per hour hitting the city through the night
Aucklanders have been forced to evacuate their homes in the middle of the night due to flash flooding, after New Zealand’s largest city was hit by unexpectedly heavy rainfall.
Evacuations were carried out in the suburbs of west Auckland and nearby townships, such as Kumeu and Piha, with firefighters having to use jet skis to reach motorists trapped in their cars, according to the New Zealand Herald.
Continue reading...Biden confirms end of 20-year military presence; US secretary of state says support for Taliban ‘will have to be earned’; Taliban fire guns into the air in Kabul in celebration
Helen Sullivan here, bringing you the latest from Afghanistan as the US ends its longest-ever war and completes its largest-ever airlift.
Afghanistan is once again under the Taliban’s control, and Afghans are uncertain as to what their leadership will look like this time around.
Continue reading...UK and international studies show the impact pandemic has had on health services and patients
The number of solid organ transplants fell dramatically around the world between 2019 and 2020, researchers have found, highlighting the widespread impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on health services and patients.
As the pandemic surged, hospitals were forced to delay potentially life-saving organ transplant surgery, because of resources such as intensive care beds being needed for Covid patients and because of concerns including whether it was safe to treat transplant recipients in hospital.
Continue reading...Donald Trump’s phone records from the day of the 6 January Capitol insurrection could be among those requested by the congressional committee looking into the deadly attack, it was reported on Monday.
Related: Hurricane Ida: up to 2 million without power as New Orleans assesses damage
Continue reading...Hospitals, funeral homes and crematoriums ‘at the edge of crisis capacity’
Two Oregon counties hit hard by Covid-19 are running out of space to hold bodies amid an intense surge in cases that is overwhelming the state’s healthcare system, forcing authorities to request refrigerated trucks to help handle the overflow.
In Josephine county, located in the state’s south-west, the local hospital is exceeding its body storage capacity and the area’s five funeral homes and three crematoriums are “at the edge of crisis capacity daily”, the county emergency manager told the state last week. Meanwhile, Tillamook county, on Oregon’s north-west coast, reported that its sole funeral home “is now consistently at or exceeding their capacity” of nine bodies.
Continue reading...From Bob Marley to the Congos, Junior Murvin and his own outstanding work on the mic, we celebrate the work of a man who seemed to dissolve time
When I moved to Kingston, Jamaica, in 2003 for a job, it was in the month that Lee “Scratch” Perry won the best reggae album Grammy for Jamaican ET, a record that, in true Scratch style, contained everything including the kitchen sink. I remember tuning in to a call-in radio programme during which Jamaicans were wondering who this guy was. It was not entirely surprising – Perry, though arguably the most influential Jamaican artist (and therefore arguably one of the most influential artists ever), is most renowned for his work as producer rather than frontman.
In truth, Perry – who has died aged 85 – was astoundingly skilled and prolific in both roles, and so it would be laughable to attempt any comprehensive “best of” or representative listing of Perry’s work (though you could turn to this good primer by David Katz, author of the exhaustive and essential 2000 biography People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee “Scratch” Perry). The music he created seems to expand – perhaps explode – all notions of what music can be, so it is more prudent to pick some standouts that demonstrate his breadth and depth than a definitive greatest hits.
Continue reading...AMA warns non-Covid patients could be sent home if hospitals see a major increase in cases. Follow the latest updates live
Scott Morrison says he has not yet spoken to US President Joe Biden about the Afghanistan evacuations.
He says the alliance remains strong and “there were no issues to be raised because we are just getting the job done”.
Daniel Hurst has been following Australia’s Afghanistan evacuation – and the fallout.
Continue reading...Tuesday: Australians concerned about Covid strategies that would significantly increase deaths. Plus: the future of dating in a vaccinated world
Good morning. There is plenty of local Covid news today, including fears about the NSW health system’s capacity to deal with a surge in cases, warnings over the deworming medicine ivermectin, and what the future of dating may look like in a vaccinated world.
The latest Guardian Essentials poll reveals Australians are concerned about any “living with Covid” strategy that would lead to a significant increase in hospitalisations and deaths. A majority think governments should not end current lockdowns until a substantial proportion of children are fully vaccinated. Some 44% of respondents (including 37% of Coalition voters in the sample) believe the current strategy should be getting Covid-19 cases down as close to zero as possible.
Continue reading...The company’s collapse has changed the startup environment, but some say the industry still hasn’t faced a ‘true reckoning’
A charismatic young leader, billions of dollars in valuations and a technology that promised to change the world but failed to deliver: the meteoric rise and fantastic fall of the medical tech startup Theranos has been seen by many as an indictment of the hype-train attitude of Silicon Valley.
Nearly 20 years after Theranos’s launch, its CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, is headed to trial, charged with defrauding clients and investors. Silicon Valley is facing a public that’s wary of its methods and intentions – but the verdict is still out on whether startup culture has fundamentally changed.
Continue reading...Governments told educating children safely must be ‘primary objective’ as new school year begins
Schools across Europe must stay open and be made safer for staff and children, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Unicef have demanded, as a new term gets under way with the highly transmissible Delta variant still dominant in the region.
“The pandemic has caused the most catastrophic disruption to education in history,” said Hans Kluge, the head of the WHO’s Europe region. “It is vital that classroom-based learning continues uninterrupted.”
Continue reading...The livelihoods of 1.5 million people are at risk as the lake’s occasional dry spells occur ever more frequently
• All photographs by Dennis Lupenga/WaterAid
There was a time when the vast Lake Chilwa almost disappeared. In 2012 it had been extremely hot in southern Malawi, with little rain to fill the rivers that ran into the lake.
“Many fishermen were forced to scramble for land near the lake banks, while others had to migrate to the city,” says Alfred Samuel. “We could barely feed our children because the lake could not provide enough fish, or water for rice growing.”
Continue reading...Gladys Berejiklian’s warning comes as state records outbreak’s first regional and Indigenous Covid death in Dubbo
The NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian has warned October will be the “worst time” for the state’s health system and intensive care units.
Her warning came as NSW reported another record number of new Covid cases on Monday with 1,290 new local infections and four deaths.
Continue reading...With a nationwide lockdown and some of the world’s strictest restrictions, Jacinda Ardern is counting on her people’s goodwill again
In locked-down New Zealand, life orbits around the 1pm briefing. As the home-bound nation digests its lunch, the director general of health, Ashley Bloomfield – frequently alongside prime minister Jacinda Ardern – takes the stage behind a socially distanced podium and updates the country.
In the midst of a Covid outbreak, those briefings occur almost every weekday. They are so clockwork-regular, so predictable in their essential structure, that certain sentences became memes: “Kia ora koutou katoa. There are X cases of Covid-19 in the community,” each begins. After the last outbreak, media outlet The Spinoff spliced together Bloomfield saying it 44 times.
Continue reading...Islay’s 9 distilleries burn 15m litres of oil a year. Now Bruichladdich is leading a radical effort to reduce emissions
Like the other famous malt whiskies made on Islay, Bruichladdich heavily promotes its idyllic island location, carefully selected Scottish barley, clear Hebridean water and loving attention of its craft distillers.
But Bruichladdich is confronting a significant problem. Like its neighbouring distilleries, and many more of Scotland’s 134 whisky producers, it relies on fuel oil, brought in on diesel-powered ferries, to fire the boilers. Islay’s nine distilleries burn 15m litres of oil each year. Ironically, this beautiful spot may well have the highest per capita CO2 emissions of any community in Scotland.
Continue reading...The modernist maestro had carte blanche to build a great museum. The result? A breathtaking icon hopeless for displaying art. British architect David Chipperfield relives his gargantuan repair job
Never has so much praise been lavished on so dysfunctional a building. The last major project of modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie is a perfectly square temple of steel and glass, raised above the street on its own granite acropolis. Built in 1968, not far from the recently erected Berlin Wall, it was intended to symbolise the freedoms of the west, its big black roof enclosing an epic column-free hall for the display of modern art. It has long been venerated as a 20th-century Parthenon, the ultimate example of Mies’s pursuit of “universal space”.
But as a museum, it has always been a disaster. Ever since it opened, the New National Gallery has been dogged by cracking windows, heavy condensation and awkward display spaces, presenting a curatorial nightmare for its staff. Beneath the impractical grand hall are subterranean galleries for the permanent collection that have the dreary feeling of a windowless office complex. It is one of the most extreme examples of the quest for purity of form trumping the demands of function.
Continue reading...At least 12,000 women are still abducted and forced into marriage every year in Kyrgyzstan. But pressure is growing to finally end the medieval custom
Aisuluu was returning home after spending the afternoon with her aunt in the village of At-Bashy, not far from the Torugart crossing into China. “It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. I had a paper bag full of samsa [a dough dumpling stuffed with lamb, parsley and onion]. My aunt always prepared them on weekends,” she said.
“A car with four men inside comes in the opposite direction to mine. And all of a sudden it … turns around and, within a few seconds, comes up beside me. One of the guys in the back gets out, yanks me and pushes me inside the car. I drop all the samsa on the pavement. I scream, I squirm, I cry, but there is nothing I can do.”
Continue reading...After 18 months of remote learning, some students will re-enter classrooms as the capital sees a fall in coronavirus infections
After almost 18 months, children in Jakarta will begin to re-enter classrooms on Monday, as Indonesia, which faces on of the worst Covid outbreaks globally, eases restrictions in some areas.
Indonesia began gradually loosening its lockdown measures last week, allowing restaurants and places of worship to open their doorsat 25% capacity, and malls to operate at 50% capacity. The relaxed rules were introduced across several regions in Java and Bali , including greater Jakarta, greater Bandung and greater Surabaya.
Continue reading...Country will be first to adopt cryptocurrency as legal tender next month – but economists are sounding warnings over risks
Litha María de Los Angeles slaps two cheese-filled pupusas – the El Salvadoran cornmeal flatbread – on the griddle. With a camera click on the QR code, she receives her payment: four hundred-thousandths of a Bitcoin. Then, as the rain pelts the corrugated iron roof and a gust of wind lifts the blue plastic table cloths, the power cuts out.
A tumultuous few weeks awaits El Salvador as it prepares to become the first country to adopt Bitcoin, the world’s most popular decentralised digital currency, as legal tender on 7 September. With that deadline looming, a host of challenges – technological, financial and criminal – threaten to sink the plan of the president, Nayib Bukele, to ride the Central American economy out of its current choppy waters on the back of a cryptocurrency wave.
Continue reading...A lawyer for the Afghans says legal proceedings are a last resort, and that Immigration New Zealand have been ‘completely flat-footed’
In the video, New Zealand flags are burning. Their edges curl and the stars of the southern cross turn black, crumbling into the soil of a Kabul backyard. The flags are printed on sheet after sheet of paper: certificates of appreciation, thanks, and recognition of service to New Zealand.
The family burning them has held on to them for the past decade, memorialising the translation services they provided for New Zealand troops in Afghanistan. Now, those papers have become a potentially deadly hazard.
Continue reading...How contagious is the Delta Covid variant? Take charge of this interactive and watch how small changes in isolation or reproduction rates of Covid-19 can affect our battle against it.
One important characteristic of viruses and other pathogens is how contagious or infectious they are. One key measure of this is the R0, or basic reproduction number, which indicates how many new cases one infected person generates.
For an R0 of three we would expect each new case of a disease to produce three other infections.
This is not just a measure of the inherent infectiousness of a disease. It also depends on other factors, including the rate of contact within a population and the duration of the infectious period. It’s a situation-dependent value, so in one city the R0 might be higher and in another lower. It also assumes that the entire population is susceptible to the disease.
So what does the R0 of Covid look like, and how does it compare with other diseases?
Continue reading...Homeland Security says only electricity in city is from generators after Ida made landfall exactly 16 years after the devastating Hurricane Katrina
The Guardian’s US southern bureau chief, Oliver Laughland, is reporting from New Orleans whenever communications allow. The city has just issued a flash flood warning until midnight. It is 8.30pm there at time of writing.
There are reports that one of the hospitals in a coastal area of Louisiana had lost all power in its Covid intensive care unit and stall are manually ventilating a number patients. We will bring you more details as they confirmed.
Winds have not died down. It’s dark out and all of New Orleans has no power pic.twitter.com/5TErvbRCn1
Continue reading...IAEA ‘deeply troubled’ by indications the 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon was operating
North Korea appears to have restarted a nuclear reactor that is widely believed to have produced plutonium for nuclear weapons, the UN atomic watchdog has said in an annual report.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has had no access to North Korea since Pyongyang expelled its inspectors in 2009. The country then pressed ahead with its nuclear weapons programme and soon resumed nuclear testing. Its last nuclear test was in 2017.
Continue reading...Some pretty special lines from the Australian distance runner and silver medallist.
Related: Jaryd Clifford: ‘Sport is so much more than a medal’ | Luke Henriques-Gomes
This is a bit cute. Knock if off, you two.
Related: Husband and wife Neil and Lora Fachie each win cycling gold at Paralympics
Continue reading...Exclusive: nurses say ‘hellhole’ conditions and staff shortages are forcing them to ‘knock patients out’ with increased sedative doses as the safest way to manage patient load
Overworked Sydney intensive care nurses are increasing sedative doses for some patients in order to manage their workload, claiming pressure from the Delta outbreak makes it impossible to monitor all of their charges.
Two ICU nurses from Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred and St Vincent’s hospitals have independently raised concerns that when working in non-Covid ICUs in recent weeks, the pressure that surging Covid cases had placed across the health system has left them understaffed to the point that increasing sedative dosage is the safest way they can manage their patient load.
Continue reading...Experts say this week is ‘crunch’ time as country waits to see whether numbers will start to fall
An apparent plateauing in community cases of Covid-19 could indicate that New Zealand’s outbreak is teetering on the edge of peak cases, experts say, as the government prepares to make an announcement over Auckland and Northland’s lockdown and essential workplaces settings.
A total of 511 New Zealanders have so far been infected in the outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant, first identified in the community on 17 August. The number needing treatment in hospital rose overnight on Sunday from 25 to 34.
Continue reading...Public indifference to abuse of the Pasifika community is especially concerning – we all need to show compassion in this crisis
The past week in lockdown has been tumultuous for many in my community. I was on my way to pick up my daughter from school when media outlets began reporting that New Zealand was headed for a possible level 4 lockdown, suggesting the Delta variant had breached our borders and there was a probable case in the community. By the time I arrived at the school, notifications were filling my messenger feed with supermarkets packed to the brim as the rush for toilet paper began. New Zealand went into full lockdown that night in its fight against Covid-19.
Within a matter of hours, news emerged that a person from the North Shore of Auckland had tested positive followed by people who had attended a large church gathering in south Auckland. Church plays a pivotal role in the Pacific community. It serves as a hub to express our faith, language and culture, where we reconnect with friends and family. It grounds us and allows us to recharge before we head back into a society that is different to what we knew in our home islands dotted around the Pacific.
Continue reading...Households prepare offerings in prayer for their ancestors and gods, but many temples are closed
On the 15th day of Ghost Month, when the gates to hell are believed to open and spirits walk the earth, Taoist masters are invited to the Zhupu Altar, a massive temple built on a hillside in Keelung, northern Taiwan. The masters hold a ceremony to assist the spirits of those who died without family or friends to pray for them, known as “hungry ghosts” but commonly referred to as good brothers and sisters to avoid offence.
Ghost Month is marked across east Asia, including Hong Kong, southern China, Indonesia and Malaysia. In Taiwan, Keelung is a significant site, with a history of violent disputes during the Qing dynasty, and it hosts the island’s biggest events. The ceremonies often draw tens of thousands of onlookers from afar, but these are Covid times.
Continue reading...Rescue workers ‘knocking down doors’ to make sure none of the 70 families remained inside
Fire has ripped through a 20-storey residential building in Milan, leaving rescue workers scrambling to make sure no one had been caught in the flames and thick smoke.
The blaze on Sunday started on the upper floors of the tower on the southern outskirts of the capital of the Lombardy region.
Continue reading...A celebration of the Jamaican producer and performer who has died aged 85. Perry was often hailed as a genius and was a major influence on Bob Marley. He also pioneered dub and roots reggae styles
Continue reading...Fears Sydney hospital ICUs are under extreme strain as nurses speak out about ‘hellhole’ conditions. Follow latest updates
The campaign to stop the campaign to have Jobkeeper payments made public is whirring up. There has been a push from non-government MPs to make the amount companies received from the taxpayer wage subsidy public, given some used it to pay dividends or made a profit during the time the subsidy ran.
The senate attempted to have the Tax Commissioner disclose the information last week. The government put in a last minute public interest immunity challenge to stop it. But the memo seems to have gone out for industry organisations to come out against it (there is also a piece in the Australian lashing the opposition for attempting to have this information public). Here is the hotels lobby:
A group of truck drivers have protested against Queensland’s vaccine mandate – essential workers entering the state from NSW will have to have the vaccine in order to be able to enter Queensland. AAP has more:
Traffic was backed up for kilometres after two prime movers were parked in the two southbound lanes of the Pacific Motorway at Reedy Creek South on the Gold Coast about 5.30am on Monday.
End all lockdowns, people go back to work and kids go back to school,” he told Nine’s Today show.
That’s what we want out of it, we’ve had enough of it.
Vaccination seems to be the way for us to be able to get through this, to get back out of lockdown and to get ourselves back to the freedoms that we love here in Australia.
The rest of the world is doing it. Sure, there is carnage left, right and centre, but there is carnage left, right and centre here.
Continue reading...Monday: ‘Hellhole’ conditions forcing NSW nursing staff to sedate patients more. Plus: Australia now sixth on Paralympics medal table
Good morning. Overworked Sydney intensive care nurses are increasing sedative doses to their maximum allowed dose for some patients, in order to manage their workload due to an increased strain on hospitals from the Delta outbreak. Guardian Australia does not suggest the nurses have administered sedatives their patients were not already prescribed by a doctor. On Sunday, as NSW reported 1,218 new infections on the worst day yet of the pandemic, there were 813 Covid patients in hospitals across NSW, 256 more than the previous week. There are now 126 people in intensive care, with 54 on ventilators.
Australians over 59, who currently are only eligible for the AstraZeneca Covid jab, could have to wait for months to get a choice of vaccines, despite Atagi calling on the government to consider making mRNA vaccines available to them. Pfizer vaccines will be available to Australians over 16 starting from today, and to 12- to 15-year-olds from 13 September. The health minister, Greg Hunt, said Moderna would be approved for 12- to 17-year-olds within two weeks.
Continue reading...Despite the balancing act – home schooling, a second baby, a fifth album and a nationwide tour – Paloma Faith always comes out fighting… and full of stories
Here’s a nice little exclusive for you,” Paloma Faith leans into my voice recorder generously, grinning, “and you’ll like this because it’s about lactation!” We are huddled outside a café on a day that promised sun but delivered rain, and she pulls her jacket around her a bit tighter – on the back, in big letters it reads: IT’S ALL BOLLOCKS.
So, she says, a week ago she put a post on Instagram about her second baby’s aversion to breastfeeding, and minutes later got a call. “‘Don’t bin the milk!’ they said. Six months of milk, I’d been pumping since my baby was born, and a lactation consultant called and told me she’d pick it up, give it to a new mother who couldn’t breastfeed and was beside herself with worry. It was all marked, dated, so I put it in a freezer bag stuffed with ice packs and sent it off.” Does the woman know… “That it’s pop star milk? Nope!”
Continue reading...Poor pay and conditions for HGV drivers and the loss of many thousands of EU workers are plunging the UKs supply chain into crisis
Gaps on supermarket shelves. Fast food outlets pulling milkshakes and bottled drinks from their menus. Restaurants running out of chicken and closing. Empty vending machines. Online grocery orders full of substitutions. Fruit and vegetables rotting in the fields.
These are just some of the most visible signs of Britain’s deepening supply chain crisis, which has seen stocks in shops and warehouses slump to their lowest levels since the Confederation of British Industry began surveying in 1983.
Continue reading...Two-thirds of people say a border poll should be held at some point in the wake of Brexit
Two-thirds of voters in Northern Ireland believe there should be a vote over its place in the UK, but only 37% want it to take place within the next five years, according to a new poll for the Observer.
Some 31% of voters said there should be a vote at some point about Northern Ireland’s place in the UK but after 2026, the LucidTalk poll found. A further 29% said there should never be such a vote. There is currently a seven-point lead for Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK should any vote take place.
Continue reading...The mountain lion, which dragged the boy across his front lawn, was later killed by wildlife officers
A mountain lion that attacked a 5-year-old boy in southern California has been shot and killed by a wildlife officer, authorities say.
The 65-pound (30kg) mountain lion attacked the boy while he was playing near his house on Thursday in Calabasas and “dragged him about 45 yards” across the front lawn, said Captain Patrick Foy, a spokesman with the California department of fish and wildlife, on Saturday.
Continue reading...She risked arrest, torture and jail to fight racism in 1980s South Africa, and her story is being made into a film
As a white South African, Sue Dobson risked arrest, torture and imprisonment spying for the black nationalist cause during the latter days of the brutal apartheid regime. She was a middle-class woman in her 20s when she joined the African National Congress (ANC) and infiltrated the white minority government – even having a honey-pot affair with a police official to obtain information, with the full support of her husband, a fellow activist. When her cover was blown in 1989, she fled to Britain, where she sought political asylum after threats to her life.
Now, for the first time in 30 years, she is ready to talk publicly about her story – that of a “very ordinary” woman who played an extraordinary part in fighting racism.
Continue reading...Charles Foster’s search for the meaning of human life leads him and his son to become hedgehog-eating hunter-gatherers in a Derbyshire wood
Charles Foster’s previous book, Being a Beast, is one of the oddest things I’ve read. In it, the author, a barrister, professor of law, part-time judge and former vet, attempts to live as a series of animals, often in the company of his charming and heavily dyslexic eight-year-old son, Tom. We see Foster eating worms and burrowing into the earth as a badger, swimming naked as an otter, foraging in bins as a fox. Now Foster is back with a follow-up, Being a Human, which acknowledges the charges of eccentricity and even insanity that were levelled at the last book.
Foster’s new work continues the project of its predecessor, although this time, rather than seeking to understand the brains and bodies of animals, his question is closer to home: what does it mean to be human? He begins with a contentious argument: far from being a story of progress, the history of humanity is one of disenchantment and loss, one where we have severed our links with other species and the natural world more broadly and in which we live meagre, circumscribed lives. “Few of us have any idea what sort of creatures we are,” he says and embarks on a quest to find out.
Continue reading...Three Texas authors expose the myth that the 1836 battle at a San Antonio mission was about freedom. It was about slavery
As the ancient American struggle over how much truth to tell about the traditional oppression of minorities bubbles over, with arguments over everything from the teaching of Critical Race Theory to the mention of anything gay in the presence of anyone under 18, this engaging new book about the history of the Alamo arrives at the perfect moment.
Related: Our Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after Trump
Continue reading...The chaotic evacuation has dented the president’s image of empathy and competence but political attacks may have limited shelf life
For Republicans it was a day of thoughts and prayers – and political opportunity.
Related: Kabul airport atrocity offers a glimpse of the chaos to come in Afghanistan
Continue reading...The question A while back my son physically hurt a friend at school. He stopped when the teacher told him off. The friend has moved on, forgiven him and even invited him to his birthday party, but it is haunting my son as he still feels bad and really anxious about it. What happened was very much out of character and he can’t explain why he did it.
Here is my son’s letter to you: I am a nine-year-old boy. A couple of months ago, I hurt my friend by squeezing his neck tight. I don’t know why. Maybe I was overtired. Now I deeply regret this and have been feeling guilty almost every day since. I apologised and I keep apologising. The boy I hurt forgave me quickly, but I can’t seem to forgive myself. What doesn’t help is that I’m not religious so I can’t speak to God and ask him for forgiveness. After it happened, I was so distressed and quiet, but those feelings were bottled up inside me. Sometimes when I think about it my stomach hurts. I’m writing in the hope you’ll teach me how to move on.
Continue reading...Once the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire, the former head of Theranos is facing fraud charges and possible jail time
The rise and fall of the blood testing startup Theranos turned the tech world upside down and captured the attention of millions beyond Silicon Valley, inspiring multiple books, documentaries and a television series.
Theranos set out to revolutionize the medical testing space, reaching a valuation of $10bn before the capabilities of its core technology were revealed to be largely fabricated. Now, its founder and former leader, Elizabeth Holmes, is about to face the music.
Continue reading...“ ‘Very well, alone’ did good service for Winston Churchill as a wartime rallying cry in 1940,” says Andrew Rawnsley (“Boris Johnson’s Global Britain is exposed as impotent and friendless by Afghanistan”, Comment). The myth that Britain “stood alone” in the Second World War and that Europe was then liberated from “our island fortress” was woven by Margaret Thatcher in her 1988 Bruges speech and became one of the driving fictions of Brexit.
“Where is Global Britain in the streets of Kabul?” was a little rich coming from Theresa May, who declared, when triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty in 2017: “I want Britain to be… a great, global trading nation that is respected around the world and strong, united and confident at home.”
Continue reading...As Hurricane Ida barrelled towards the Louisiana coast, residents braced for a storm of potentially historic proportions due to arrive on the 16th anniversary of Katrina, the brutal hurricane that claimed more than 1,800 lives on America’s Gulf coast.
National Weather Service officials announced on Saturday night that Ida continued to strengthen in the Gulf of Mexico and was set to become a category 3 hurricane overnight, before making landfall on Sunday afternoon as a potential category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 130mph (210 km/h), life-threatening storm surges and heavy rain.
Continue reading...The nation’s Delta outbreak continues to grow, with Auckland likely to remain in lockdown for at least another fortnight
New Zealand’s Covid-19 outbreak continues to spread, with 83 cases announced on Sunday – a new daily high for this outbreak.
All but one of the new cases were found in Auckland, with the other in Wellington.
Continue reading...James Cook University team hope replanting project will be a blueprint for restoring underwater meadows on Great Barrier Reef
Researchers have been forced to avoid crocodiles, deadly jellyfish and even quicksand-like mud to replant seagrass beds south of Cairns as part of a project they hope to expand across tropical Australia.
The underwater meadows at Mourilyan Harbour were once thriving habitats, providing food for prawns, dugongs and green sea turtles.
Continue reading...Brazilian president’s remark to evangelical leaders came as he questioned country’s voting system
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro says he sees three options for his future: winning the 2022 presidential election, death or prison.
“I have three alternatives for my future: being arrested, killed or victory,” he said on Saturday, in remarks to a meeting of evangelical leaders. Bolsonaro later added that the first option is out of question. “No man on Earth will threaten me.”
Continue reading...Survey by Shanghai University that asked colleges to research the political stance and ‘state of mind’ of members of LGBTQ+ communities has sparked alarm
A well-known Chinese university appears to have asked its colleges to make lists of their LGBTQ+ students and report on their “state of mind”, according to a purported internal directive published online on both Chinese and foreign social media platforms.
Shanghai University has not confirmed the request or responded to queries about its intention, but it has sparked alarm among young Chinese people, coming after a crackdown on campus groups and organisations supporting LGBTQ+ and feminist communities.
Continue reading...Speaking on Saturday afternoon, Biden vows further strikes against Islamic State as airport terror threat ‘remains high’; largest UK evacuation mission since second world war comes to a close
US military and coalition flights took approximately 2,000 people from Kabul, Afghanistan, from 3am Eastern time to 3pm on Saturday, Reuters reports, citing a White House official.
Biden plans to withdraw all US diplomatic staff, including the ambassador, by Tuesday the Washington Post reports. It remains unclear whether or when they might return, the Post reports, citing two US officials:
Despite the Taliban’s expressed interest in having the United States maintain a diplomatic mission in Kabul, the Biden administration has not made a final decision about what a future presence might look like. On Friday, State Department spokesman Ned Price said the Biden administration is “actively discussing” the Taliban’s request with US allies and partners in the region – but the United States has not yet engaged directly with the Taliban to discuss what form a diplomatic mission might take, according to one US official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive policy deliberations.
The lack of a set plan all but ensures that the United States’ diplomatic presence in Kabul will lapse for weeks, months or even longer — potentially complicating the Biden administration’s ability to make good on recent assurances that although the US military is departing the country by 31 August, the United States will continue to help Americans and Afghans who want to leave after they are gone.
Continue reading...Triathlon: Lauren Parker speaks after being caught just before the line, saying that she knew Gretsch was on the way.
“I gave it everything I could. I put my head down and went for it. I’m pretty proud of my efforts.”
Wheelchair basketball: A good start for the Great Britain men’s team against their old rivals Iran (I made that up), leading 19-24 in the second quarter. The Brits are currently second in their group behind their old rivals Australia (I made that up too).
https://ift.tt/4t29xJd Ethiopia is famously landlocked. That’s why the ambitious Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed has long harbored visi...