A woman reportedly arrived at the hospital with the deceased child in the car
A three-year-old child has reportedly been found dead in a car outside a north Queensland hospital with a police investigation under way.
Police were called to the Townsville University hospital about 3.30pm on Friday, a spokesman told Guardian Australia.
Continue reading...Talks over other dual-national detainees risk encouraging Tehran to see hostage-taking as a winning strategy
The release of Kylie Moore-Gilbert, the British Australian academic, is a bittersweet moment for the relatives across the globe of other Iranian dual nationals still trapped in Iranian jails. Many families celebrated her release, but also asked themselves again whether their own governments are doing all they can to bring their loved ones home.
Sherry Izadi, the wife of a 66-year-old British-Iranian construction engineer, Anoosheh Ashoori, jailed for 10 years, told the Guardian: “It is extraordinary the lengths the Australian government was prepared to go to secure her release. They seem to have persuaded the Thai government to exchange three Iranians accused of terrorism in return for her release.” The three-way negotiations between the governments took six months.
Continue reading...Scott Morrison says Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s release from Iranian prison a ‘miracle’; Labor and Greens accuse Berejiklian over council grants; an Adelaide high school is closed after Covid case – follow updates
I’ll be passing over the blog to my colleague Michael McGowan, who will take you through the next part of the afternoon.
I’ve been Elias Visontay. Have a great afternoon.
The high court has granted special leave to appeal in a landmark case on casual employment.
In the Workpac v Rosatto decision the federal court found employees described as casuals could be owed further entitlements if they performed regular, permanent work.
Continue reading...British-Australian academic has been imprisoned in Iran since 2018
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, the Australian-British academic detained by Iran on espionage charges, has been released in a prisoner exchange for three Iranians.
In what will be seen as a victory for Iranian state hostage-taking by some and a humanitarian move by others, Moore-Gilbert was released on Wednesday morning. The move also raises hopes for the fate of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, dual UK-Iranian nationals who have been held since 2016 and 2017 respectively.
Continue reading...Germany reports 410 Covid-related deaths in 24 hours; Sicilian hospitals struggling with shortage of medical personnel; global cases near 60m cases
The regional government of Madrid is proposing allowing groups of up to 10 people to gather on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day and the feast of the Epiphany (6 January). The number of different households allowed to mix would be capped at three.
Under the plans, which have been submitted to the central government, the current midnight to 6am curfew would be replaced on those days by one running from 1.30am to 6am.
Authorities in Sicily have asked Cuba’s government to send to the region about 60 health operators, including doctors and nurses, as hospitals are struggling with a shortage of medical personnel during the second wave.
The request was filed this week to the Italian embassy in Cuba and consists of intensive care specialists, nurses, anaesthetists, resuscitators, virologists and pneumologists, the Italian newspaper la Repubblica has reported.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Former finance minister’s pitch pushes ‘zero net emissions as soon as possible’, which contradicts record while in Australian government
Australia’s former finance minister Mathias Cormann is continuing to talk up the importance of a “collective green recovery” on the campaign trail to be the next secretary general of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In a “vision statement” for the position obtained by Guardian Australia, Cormann says undertaking “effective global action on climate change is a must and we must get to zero net emissions as soon as possible”.
Continue reading...Frances Adamson urges Beijing to reflect on how its increasingly assertive stance is being received by other countries
Australia’s foreign affairs chief has warned Beijing against resorting to “pressure or coercion”, declaring China would be wrong to assume it was now so powerful it could set the terms of its engagement with the world.
Amid heightened tensions between Australia and its largest trading partner, Frances Adamson used a major speech on Wednesday night to urge the Chinese government to reflect on how its increasingly assertive actions would be received by other countries.
Continue reading...NSW to ease coronavirus restrictions, including the number allowed to visit a home; Queensland prepares for influx of visitors ahead of December 1 border reopening. Follow updates
Scott Morrison has defended providing Mathias Cormann a government-funded Royal Air Force jet so he can travel around the world as he campaigns to be secretary general of the OECD.
The prime minister said there was an “extremely high” risk Cormann, who recently resigned as finance minister, would catch Covid if he were forced to travel on commercial flights.
That’s funded by the government because we’re taking this bid very seriously and the reason we need him to do that in the Air Force jet is because Covid is running rampant in Europe, and this is a very important position, and the OECD is going to play a really important role in the global economic recovery.
There really wasn’t the practical option to use commercial flights in the time we had available, because of Covid. If Mathias was flying around on commercial planes, he would have got Covid. The risk of that was extremely high.
Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has confirmed Victorians will be able to enter her state without quarantining from 1 December, after Victoria announced no new cases on Tuesday.
It comes a day after the same reopening was granted to residents of Greater Sydney, as both Greater Sydney and Victoria achieved 28 days of no community transmission without an unknown transmission source.
I just heard and that’s wonderful news and can I congratulate Daniel Andrews, their chief health officer and all of Victorians because this is just such fantastic news. So it means on 1 December, Victorians can also come to Queensland and, of course, Queenslanders can go to Victoria as well. So very, very good news.
We’re absolutely prepared for the influx of people for the Queensland holidays. In fact, just yesterday, we saw a 250% increase in some of our tourism operators across Queensland. So that is absolutely wonderful news.”
Continue reading...Victoria records zero active cases for the first time since outbreak as SA plans to drop restrictions on 1 December – follow latest updates
Further to Andrew Hastie’s comments on the Brereton report, which we reported earlier, the WA Liberal MP has been on the ABC expanding on his call for greater parliamentary oversight of the military.
He tells Andrew Probyn:
Defence is a huge organisation. In order for parliament to exercise proper civilian oversight of the military you have to have a baseline understanding of the capabilities, the methods, and the operations of the ADF. If we can’t talk about those things in public, we can’t talk about them at all.
So we need to talk about them in a classified space and right now there is no such mechanism in the parliament to increase parliamentarians’ understanding of defence and therefore enable parliament to hold it to account.
Scott Morrison and the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, swapped notes on Covid-19 situations in their two countries during a phone call this afternoon.
A readout issued by Morrison’s office says the pair also discussed progress on vaccine trials and they “were encouraged by the more positive trajectory of their economies in the third quarter”.
Continue reading...The sonnenrad is associated with a grab bag of esoteric racist nonsense, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful as a symbol of hatred and murder
If you weren’t aware that the symbol posted by Pete Evans is functionally equivalent to a swastika, that’s because part of its attraction to contemporary neo-Nazis is its slight obfuscation of the true nature of their movement.
It’s also because it has been more widely adopted as a symbol for the racist politics of fascism as the focus of that movement has changed its emphasis from ultranationalism to a transnational focus on supposed dangers to the white race, wherever they may be.
Continue reading...The series was cancelled in 2013 but its biggest crime was being born too soon. Now streaming in Australia, here’s hoping it gets the audience it deserves
What happens when an annoying narcissist has a spiritual awakening? Do they become different? Better? Or does real change require much more than learning how to meditate?
Enlightened, starring Laura Dern, aired for two seasons on HBO from 2011 to 2013. Critics loved it, a third season was on the cards – but it never got the mainstream viewership it deserved and was cancelled due to poor ratings.
Continue reading...Prosecutors have also launched proceedings to arrest child’s mother, who left country
Prosecutors in Qatar have announced that the airport police officers who ordered forced vaginal examinations of female passengers after a newborn child was discovered abandoned in a bin have been charged and could face prison sentences of up to three years.
Prosecutors did not say how many officers faced charges over the incident last month at Hamad international airport, which sparked widespread anger in Australia, a key destination for the state-owned Qatar Airways.
Continue reading...Vaccine from Oxford University and AstraZeneca; US suffers one Covid death every minute
AstraZeneca will have 200m doses of its candidate vaccine developed by the University of Oxford by the end of 2020, with 700m ready globally by the end of the first quarter of 2021, operations executive Pam Cheng has said.
Cheng told a briefing that there would be 20m doses in the UK by the end of the year, with 70m more for the UK by the end of March that year.
Pope Francis can relate to people in intensive care units who fear dying from coronavirus because of his own experience when part of his lung was removed 63 years ago, he has been quoted as saying.
The comments are included in excerpts of a new book “Let Us Dream: The Path to A Better Future”, which are carried in Italian newspapers on Monday ahead of publication of the full work next month.
I know from experience the feeling of those who are sick with coronavirus, struggling to breathe as they are attached to a ventilator.
They took about a litre and a half of water out of one lung and I was hanging between life and death.
[The experience] changed my bearings. For months, I didn’t know who I was, if I would live or die, even the doctors didn’t know. I remember hugging my mother one day and asking her if I was about to die.
Thanks to her regular contact with sick people, she knew what patients needed better than the doctor and had the courage to put that experience to work.
Continue reading...Prime minister says diplomatic difficulties Australia is navigating are ‘a foretaste’ for others around the world
Scott Morrison has used a speech to the British Policy Exchange to call for a more nuanced appreciation of national interest, and more flexibility, when countries pursue relationships with America and China, because “stark choices are in no one’s interests”.
In a section of his speech outlining the challenges of navigating Australia’s fraught relationship with China in an era of escalating geopolitical competition, Morrison on Monday night said “greater latitude will be required from the world’s largest powers to accommodate the individual interests of their partners and allies” because “we all need a bit more room to move”.
Continue reading...Restrictions on indoor gatherings are relaxed in Victoria as South Australia’s opposition calls for end to hotel quarantine. Follow the latest updates
South Australian premier Steven Marshall has reiterated his state is “not out of the woods yet”, a day after one new case of coronavirus was recorded in the community.
The comments follow a decision to lift the state’s Covid-19 lockdown early after authorities learned a key case linked to its emerging cluster out of a quarantine hotel had lied to investigators about working a second job at a pizza restaurant.
You don’t get a second chance to stop a second wave. The advice that we received from health was unequivocal. We had to go hard and go early. We didn’t want a second wave.
We didn’t want to have this seeded in South Australia so that we were managing multiple clusters on an ongoing basis until this particular infection actually, if you like, died out.
We think the people of South Australia deserve some answers on this and we will look at every opportunity for there to be some consequences for this person because it is really important that when a public health official asks you questions you provide them with accurate information otherwise lives can be at stake.
Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon has backed the sentiment behind a speech to be delivered today by party colleague, Queensland senator Murray Watt, which indicates plans to “reset the party’s approach to coal and gas”.
Watt, the opposition minister for northern Australia, will say the ALP “treasures” every job created in the mining sector at a speech to be delivered in Rockhampton today, The Australian reports.
Federal MPs @Barnaby_Joyce and @FitzHunter talk about when international travel could resume and the Labor party's position on mining and agriculture. pic.twitter.com/nuxjsmFgPs
No doubt he wants to put labour back into the Labor party. And today he speaks to our traditional base, all those people in the hi-vis and blue collar outfits, working hard every day in Queensland.
All they want for us is to give credit to them for what they do, the contribution they make to our economy and community. And we want to encourage them to be proud of what they do as they should be.
We need to be ... very loud and clear in our expressions of support for those industries, and those who work within them.
The Labor party always supported the coal mining industry, it always supported the gas sector, the oil sector, etc our manufacturers, but for some reason we haven’t been that keen to say that loudly and proudly. And if that’s what we’re about to start doing well, I’ll be very very pleased.
Continue reading...Long-running study finds 63% of voters support drug minimisation strategy shunned by governments
Nearly two-thirds of the Australian public are in favour of pill testing at music festivals, new national data shows.
The findings, drawn from the Australian National University’s long-running election study, show strong public support for a drug harm minimisation strategy that has largely been shunned by governments across the country despite high-profile cases of deaths at music festivals.
Continue reading...Former rivals to star in Leveson-style inquiry into mogul’s near-monopoly of the country’s media
In high public office, both men lived and died at the word of the world’s most influential media mogul, Rupert Murdoch. But now two former Australian prime ministers are at the vanguard of a campaign to redress the balance of power. It is a movement that Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, the respective former Labor and Liberal leaders of Australia, hope will go on to undermine all of Murdoch’s international enterprises.
The two former PMs were once rivals but are to appear as joint star witnesses at an upcoming Australian parliamentary inquiry into Murdoch’s dominance of the Australian political debate. Both are to argue that News Corp Australia has become the propaganda arm of the rightwing Liberal government.
Continue reading...Infections up in UK by more than 18,000 on Sunday; warning over Gaza Strip infections; G20 leaders agree to fund fair distribution of vaccines
Experts have urged Americans against travelling for family gatherings at Thanksgiving this week even though millions were set to defy the advice, as the US crossed the threshold of more than 12m cases of coronavirus.
Ominous warnings came as Donald Trump appeared to admit that coronavirus is “running wild” across the US, in contrast with his statements throughout the election campaign that the virus would simply “go away” or “disappear” and, more recently, that the country was “rounding the turn” on the pandemic.
Related: Millions of Americans set to ignore warnings against Thanksgiving travel
The Palestinian health ministry has recommended strict limits on Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem this year due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Celebrations in the biblical town revered by Christians as Jesus’ birthplace are usually attended by thousands of people from around the world, but this year the ministry has recommended the upcoming tree lighting ceremony in Manger Square be limited to 50 people, throughout the festive season.
Continue reading...Australia’s trade minister says China should clarify why other nations maintained workable relations despite differences
China should explain why it appears to have singled out Australia with a range of import restrictions that have disrupted trade flows and undermined trust in the economic relationship, the Australian trade minister has said.
With Australia and its largest trading partner locked in a stalemate over how to end the tensions, Simon Birmingham also used a television interview on Sunday to accuse the Chinese embassy in Canberra of taking a number of unhelpful actions this year.
Continue reading...A man has been killed while swimming at the beach in Broome, according to reports
A man was killed in a shark attack at Cable beach in Broome in the north of Western Australia on Sunday morning.
The attack occurred approximately 1.5km north of Cable Beach Surf Club.
Continue reading...