Tony Abbott implores Cpac to give Liberals ‘one last chance’ and condemns party’s ‘factional warlords’

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Former PM, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and conference chair Warren Mundine among right faction heavyweights urging conservative voters to unite

Tony Abbott has urged conservatives to give the Liberals “one last chance” and apologised for the party’s 2025 election drubbing, joining a host of high-profile Coalition figures at a major political conference in imploring voters not to abandon the opposition for right-wing minor parties.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, recently dumped from the shadow frontbench, exhorted the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) in Brisbane to stick with the Liberal party, and encouraged her parliamentary colleagues to dump a net zero climate target, to cheers from attendees.

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Optus confirms fourth death after CEO reveals warnings of failed triple zero calls not escalated

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Emergency calls were offline for nearly 14 hours, during which four people died – including an eight-week-old baby

A fourth person died during Optus’s network outage on Thursday, its CEO has confirmed.

Stephen Rue said in a statement released on Saturday afternoon that the telco was “saddened to learn of a new fatality in Western Australia, which appears to have occurred during the outage period”.

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IDF warns aid workers only hospitals are protected sites in northern Gaza

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Israeli military says aid infrastructure could be targeted after order to ‘all Gaza residents and inhabitants’ to leave

Humanitarian workers in northern Gaza have been repeatedly warned by the Israeli military that only hospitals will be considered protected sites and all other aid infrastructure could be targeted.

In messages and conversations with aid workers in recent days seen by the Guardian, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said an order to “all Gaza residents and inhabitants” to evacuate Gaza City, the biggest urban centre in the territory, applied “to all humanitarian locations [there], except hospitals” and warned that “to defeat Hamas [Israeli troops] will operate … with great force”.

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‘This is their attempt to silence him’: Umar Khalid reaches five years in Indian jail without trial

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Held since 2020, India’s most prominent political prisoner has become a symbol of repression under the Modi regime

“There is indeed something about captivity that makes one feel like a state of somewhere between life and death,” wrote Umar Khalid in June in a letter penned as his fifth year languishing behind bars approached.

Few understand the purgatory of jail like Khalid. For five years – since his arrest in September 2020 under a draconian terrorism law – he has remained India’s most prominent political prisoner, to many a potent symbol of the systematic crushing of dissent under the dominant Hindu nationalist regime of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

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Sudan: RSF drone strike kills dozens in Darfur – dw.com

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  1. Sudan: RSF drone strike kills dozens in Darfur  dw.com
  2. ‘Harrowing Beyond Description’: Dozens Killed While at Prayer in Sudan  The New York Times
  3. Scores killed by RSF drone strike on mosque in besieged Sudanese city  The Guardian
  4. More than 70 civilians killed in attack on mosque in Darfur’s el-Fasher  Al Jazeera
  5. El-Fasher: Drone strike on Sudan mosque kills 78, medic tells BBC  BBC
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Chinese executive jailed for 25 years in US for trafficking fentanyl chemicals

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Qingzhou Wang of Amarvel Biotech accused by prosecutors of turning chemical company into ‘pipeline of poison’

A Chinese company executive has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for trafficking in chemicals used to manufacture fentanyl, the US justice department has said.

Qingzhou Wang, 37, principal executive of Amarvel Biotech, a company based in Wuhan, and Yiyi Chen, 33, the firm’s marketing manager, were convicted in New York in February of fentanyl precusor importation and money laundering.

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