Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Daniel Andrews says Victoria’s roadmap out of coronavirus lockdown has “not been finalised” as government and health experts meet before the unveiling of the plan on Sunday.
Calls for Australian government to regard him as a foreign agent and explain how he can possibly work on a post-Brexit trade deal
The controversial appointment of Australian former prime minister Tony Abbott as an official trade adviser for the UK has sparked questions as to how he will manage conflicts of interest.
At least 15 people have been arrested at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance and Albert Park after at least 200 protesters defied the city’s stage-four lockdowns to hold an anti-lockdown rally on Saturday.
Police in New South Wales also arrested three people at an unauthorised protest in Sydney’s Hyde Park while another protest was held at Sydney’s Olympic Park. Smaller protests were also held in Townsville, Brisbane and Byron Bay.
Australia’s telling of the Pacific war story is correctly replete with Japanese atrocities. But crimes against Japanese prisoners do not feature prominently
Seventy-five years after the end of the second world war in the Pacific, the human suffering of millions of combatants and civilians is easily overlooked in a binary focus on allied victory and Japanese surrender.
Three-quarters of a century later, Japanese humiliation still simmers in politics and among families of the surrendered or dead. On the other side, meanwhile, countless were the returned soldiers and their families who have long harboured seething hatred for the Japanese.
First Nations Australians were deported to Papua New Guinea under ‘aliens’ power in constitution
The continuing incarceration of at least 20 people claiming to be of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent in immigration detention centres in Australia appears unlawful and they may be entitled to compensation, legal experts say.
A spokesperson from Australian Border Force said that so far only five “non-citizen non-aliens have been released from immigration detention”.
Critics say Abbott’s views on women and homosexuality and the climate crisis make him unfit for role
Boris Johnson has appointed Tony Abbott as an official UK trade adviser, defying widespread condemnation of the former Australian prime minister’s record of misogyny and homophobia and his views on the climate emergency.
Abbott, whose consideration for the role prompted criticism from opposition parties, charities and LGBT and environmental activists, is among nine external advisers appointed to the Board of Trade. The board, revived by Theresa May, is intended to help shape post-Brexit trade policy.
Victoria reports nine deaths in the past 24 hours and 50 people added to total who died in aged care facilities in July and August. Follow live news and updates today
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, who was celebrating the AFL’s decision to stage the grand final in her state just two days ago, has called for tough penalties to be meted out to the two Richmond players arrested on the Surfers Paradise strip in the early hours of this morning.
With the AFL and police investigating the incident, which left Sydney Stack and Callum Coleman-Jones with facial injuries, Palaszczuk wants the pair thrown out of the state.
AFL players caught breaking Covid rules should be sent home,.
Queensland won’t tolerate it. I know the AFL takes these issues seriously and will take appropriate action.”
One of the announcements out of national cabinet was that leaders “agreed that we needed to further boost the capacity for inbound arrivals into Australia, particularly for those Australians seeking to come home”.
However, Scott Morrison did not outline any detail of exactly how the arrival caps – which currently allow for about 4,000 passengers to enter Australian quarantine hotels each week – would be further boosted to help repatriate the 23,000 Australians (at least that’s how many have registered with Dfat) who want to come home but can’t.
US president Donald Trump slammed House speaker Nancy Pelosi after the Democrat was filmed at an indoor hair salon with her face covering around her neck. Trump, a longtime critic of Pelosi, pounced on the opportunity to attack her over the incident.
“I’ll tell you what, she must have treated that beauty salon owner pretty badly. She uses the salon and the salon turned her in?” he said. “So I just put out that if she was set up, then she shouldn’t be leading the House of Representatives. I want the salon owner to lead the House of Representatives”:
A groundbreaking new comedy sketch show based on women’s sex lives during lockdown, starring Aimee Lou Wood and Miriam Margolyes, is designed to “claim the stage” for women, its co-creator, Joanna Scanlan, says.
Sex Lives, believed to be the first interactive comedy backed by the BBC’s commercial wing, BBC Studios, documents stories submitted anonymously by women and has proved a hit online.
Smoking appears to increase the genetic contribution to Covid-19 infections, a small study suggested.
The new coronavirus enters the body by hijacking proteins on the surface of healthy cells, in particular a protein called angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2).
Liberia’s president George Weah has sacked the country’s top health official over his handling of coronavirus testing in the impoverished West African state.
Mososka Fallah, director general of the Public Health Institute of Liberia (NPHIL), was removed from his post for “breaches in the health and administrative protocols that guide the issuance of Covid-19 test results,” Weah’s office said in a statement.
Rescuers search for more than 40 crew from ship carrying 6,000 cattle that went down en route from New Zealand to China
A second survivor from a cargo ship carrying 6,000 cattle that capsized off southwest Japan has died after being pulled from the water unconscious on Friday.
The Japanese coast guard said the man had been unresponsive when he was found about 120 km (75 miles) north-northwest of Amami Oshima island and transferred to a hospital.
National cabinet will look at alternatives to state border closures and discuss the cap on international arrivals
Scott Morrison is expected to secure agreement from some but not all state and territory leaders on a definition of hotspots when they meet on Friday with a review of the current cap on international arrivals also on the agenda.
The prime minister has been ratcheting up pressure on the premiers for weeks to reopen their borders, and the commonwealth has been working up a definition of a hotspot with a view to replacing current border controls with localised lockdowns to control coronavirus outbreaks.
Security firms involved in guarding Melbourne quarantine hotels continue giving evidence at the state’s inquiry into the program. Follow live news and updates today
This is also very interesting, given what we have seen play out this pandemic:
Our Parliamentary Library has published its latest research note that provides a brief overview of the size, operation and recent history of residential aged care in Victoria. It’s available at https://t.co/DonHd6SQ4g#springst
The auditor-general has responded to Stephen Jones’s request to have the early superannuation access scheme audited.
He has said no, as there are other priorities at the moment:
Dear Mr Jones
I am writing in response to your letter of 5 August 2020 requesting that I review the integrity and performance of the Government’s early release scheme for superannuation, as established through the Coronavirus Economic Response Omnibus Package Act 2020.
Under Melbourne’s strict lockdown rules, couples who live apart can visit each other but other visitors are banned, so a lot of single people who live alone, like Ford, have spent weeks completely isolated. Victorians are allowed to exercise with one other person for an hour outdoors, but that person has to live nearby because of the restrictions on movement. In practice, this means that unless you live in the same suburb as your friends and family, you are unlikely to be able to exercise together:
The UK government is to trial routine weekly Covid testing of the population as part of preparations to head off a possible winter second wave, as the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt called for such tests to become the norm.
Matt Hancock said the government was committing an extra £500m to scale up testing capacity and launch community pilots trialling the effectiveness of repeat testing in schools and colleges, as well as in the population as a whole. It will also ramp up the trials of a new test kit that it is claimed can provide results within 20 minutes:
Lifeboat spotted but strong winds and rain hamper rescue of crew from Philippines, New Zealand and Australia
The Japanese coastguard is looking for a cargo ship carrying livestock and dozens of crew members that went missing after issuing a distress signal during typhoon Maysak.
The Panamanian-registered vessel, called Gulf Livestock 1, sent the distress call from the East China Sea, to the west of Amami Oshima Island in south-western Japan, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported.
More than 90 people – the wounded, the mourning, the defiant – spoke at the sentencing hearing for the gunman responsible for New Zealand’s most deadly terrorist attack, explaining how the massacre changed their lives forever. Here we document their evidence
Sources say authorities make two prisoners follow the British Australian academic everywhere in the Covid-ravaged Qarchak jail
Kylie Moore-Gilbert has enough money to buy food and water inside Iran’s notorious Qarchak prison, but is closely surveilled everywhere she goes, sources inside the jail say.
Fellow prisoners report that the British Australian academic appears to have so far escaped infection in the wave of Covid-19 sweeping through the prison, but that her communications with the outside world are strictly proscribed, according to Roya Boroumand, executive director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center (ABC) for Human Rights in Iran.
Greece recorded has recorded the first coronavirus case in the overcrowded migrant camp of Moria on the island of Lesbos, two migration ministry officials said on Wednesday.
A 40-year old asylum seeker has tested positive for the virus and had been put in isolation, one of the officials told Reuters. Authorities were trying to trace the people he had been in contact with, the official said.
I am now handing over the blog to the very capable Amy Walker. Thank you for reading and please do keep us updated on all coronavirus-related tips and stories.
Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll appears to be easing for the first time since May, data shows, a sign the Latin American country could be descending from a long infection plateau that has seen it suffer the world’s second-worst outbreak after the United States, Reuters reports.
With nearly 4 million confirmed cases, the virus has killed over 120,000 people in Brazil. But the level of average daily deaths dropped below 900 per day last week - the lowest in three and a half months and below the rate of both the United States and India, according to a Reuters tally.
Researchers at Imperial College London also calculate that the transmission rate in Brazil, at which each person infected with the coronavirus infects another person, is now below 1, the level required for new infections to slow.
Twenty-one separate publications, six corporate groups and 19 individual journalists charged
Twenty-one separate publications, six corporate groups and 19 individual journalists charged with breaching a suppression order during the George Pell trial in 2018 will face a single, but complex, trial in November.
Spain recorded 8,115 new cases of Covid-19 on Tuesday evening, 2,731 of them diagnosed in the previous 24 hours, according to the latest figures from the national health ministry.
The latest statistics bring the country’s total to 470,973 cases, of which 99,889 have been logged over the past fortnight. Over the past seven days, 159 people have died from the virus, bringing the death toll to 29,152.
Cuban authorities launched a strict 15-day lockdown of Havana on Tuesday in order to stamp out the low level but persistent spread of coronavirus in the capital.
Aggressive anti-virus measures, including closing down air travel, have virtually eliminated Covid-19 in Cuba with the exception of the capital, where cases have increased from a handful a day to dozens daily over the last month.