Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Chinese embassy in Canberra accuses Australian media of ‘rumours, lies and malicious slanders against China’ that has been picked up by politicians
China has hit back at “baseless accusations” that are “completely rubbish” after Australia accused Beijing of spreading disinformation during the pandemic.
At a press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday, the Chinese government spokesman Zhao Lijian accused Australian officials of undermining international efforts to combat the virus.
Australia and New Zealand are about to begin negotiations on a free trade agreement with the UK in what the Australian trade minister said was “a strong signal of our mutual support for free trade” in a post-Covid-19 world.
Simon Birmingham said Australia was “ready to help the UK find new beginnings post-Brexit and in doing so, open up new doors for our farmers, businesses and investors”.
Julian Hill is looking at the government’s spend on consultants (an evergreen sentence, no matter what political party is in government)
New analysis by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has found that the big four consultancy firms – Deloitte, Ernest&Young, KPMG and PwC – now collectively reap $800m a year in government contracts.
But only 20% of that figure is spent on actual consultancy contracts, meaning the Morrison government is paying top dollar to large consultancy firms to work as contractors doing the day-to-day work of public servants.
The Australia Institute has begun a new campaign to have truth in advertising part of Australia’s political advertising.
An open letter coordinated by the Australia Institute and signed by 29 prominent Australians calls for parliament to pass truth-in-political advertising laws that are nationally consistent, constitutional and uphold freedom of speech.
Signatories to the open letter include former political party leaders and politicians, Dr John Hewson, Cheryl Kernot and Michael Beahan; former supreme court judges, the Hon Anthony Whealy QC, the Hon Paul Stein AM QC and the Hon David Harper AM QC, as well as barristers, community leaders, business people and other prominent Australians.
Class action lawyers raise prospect of misfeasance claim against ministers
The robodebt debacle’s financial cost looks set to grow after a judge suggested it was likely the federal government would have to pay interest on unlawful debts issued to hundreds of thousands welfare recipients over nearly five years.
And in an escalation of the class action brought by Gordon Legal, lawyers for the firm raised the prospect of a misfeasance in public office claim that could force ministers to front court over the saga.
The number of confirmed Covid-19 infections has passed 25,000 in Afghanistan while a key testing laboratory paused work due to lack of kits.
The health ministry has detected 761 new cases from 1,551 tests in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of confirmed infections to 25,527.
Norway will halt its Covid-19 track and trace app, and delete all data collected so far, after criticism from the Norwegian Data Protection Authority.
The app was introduced by some Norwegian authorities to limit the transmission of the coronavirus.
We don’t agree with the DPA’s evaulation, but feel it is necessary to delete all data and put work on hold as a result of this.
We will as a result weaken an important part of our preparedness against a spread in infection, as we now lose time for development and testing of the app.
Ship was considered low risk as updated status preventing passengers from disembarking was not reflected on assessment form
A New South Wales public health official thinks he would have assessed the Ruby Princess as being a medium Covid-19 risk ahead of the ill-fated cruise ship’s arrival in Sydney, had he considered a guideline change during his assessment.
The ship was instead given a low-risk rating, with passengers allowed to disembark and disperse before testing revealed there had been Covid-19 cases on board.
Social media site incorrectly removed historical photo on grounds of nudity, then for three days blocked and even banned users who posted link to article
Facebook has blocked and in some cases banned users who tried to share a Guardian article about the site incorrectly blocking an image of Aboriginal men in chains.
On Saturday, Guardian Australia reported that Facebook had apologised for incorrectly preventing an Australian user from sharing the photo from the 1890s.
‘Shameful’ Collateral Murder footage shows Apache helicopter mowing down 11 civilians – including two Reuters journalists – in Baghdad
US prosecutors have failed to include one of WikiLeaks’ most shocking video revelations in the indictment against Julian Assange, a move that has brought accusations the US doesn’t want its “war crimes” exposed in public.
Assange, an Australian citizen, is remanded and in ill health in London’s Belmarsh prison while the US tries to extradite him to face 18 charges – 17 under its Espionage Act – for conspiracy to receive, obtain and disclose classified information.
Deaths worldwide pass 430,000;New York State sees lowest deaths since pandemic started; evacuation flight for British nationals leaves Colombia. Follow the latest updates
The way Russia counts fatalities during the coronavirus pandemic could be one reason why its official death toll of 6,829 is far below many other countries, reports the Associated Press. Despite the comparatively low number of fatalities, Russia has reported 520,000 infections, behind only the United States and Brazil.
The paradox also has led to allegations by critics and Western media that Russian authorities might have falsified the numbers for political purposes to play down the scale of the outbreak. Even a top World Health Organization official said the low number of deaths in Russia certainly is unusual.
The Guardian’s Paris correspondent, Kim Wilsher, has this report from Paris, where streets have been pedestrianised and the mayor has turned parking spaces into cycle lanes.
It is evening rush hour and the Rue de Rivoli, a major east-west road through central Paris, is heaving. Pre-coronavirus, it would have been one long traffic jam, paralysed by increasingly frustrated and angry motorists. Now, though, with private cars banned, it is busy with pedestrians, cyclists and a smattering of taxis and buses.
North of Rue de Rivoli, in the Marais, a maze of narrow cobbled streets, cafes, restaurants and bars have spread out across pavements and parking places.
UK care homes are receiving far more coronavirus testing kits than they order, raising concern that the extra supplies help the government inflate the number of people it claims have been tested.
The apparently widespread nature of the practice in England has prompted fresh suspicion that ministers are counting swab kits sent out as tests done to exaggerate official figures.
France has reported nine new coronavirus deaths taking the total to 29,407 and marking the fifth day with under 30 fatalities, Reuters reports.
The government also reported the number of people in hospital fell by 28 to 10,881 and those in intensive care units fell by two to 869, with both tallies continuing weeks-long down-trends.
Senior Morrison government ministers have flagged shorter quarantine periods for international students and business travellers as part of a suite of measures to reopen Australia to international travel.
On Sunday, the health minister, Greg Hunt, confirmed that modifications to the existing mandatory two-week hotel quarantine could be enacted in addition to travel bubbles with safe countries, such as New Zealand, which would not require quarantine.
Simon Birmingham says Cam Gilespie, arrested with over 7.5kg of methamphetamine, has 10 days to appeal
Australia’s trade minister says the sentencing to death in China of an Australian man for drug smuggling should not necessarily be linked to the ongoing friction between the countries.
Cam Gilespie was arrested with more than 7.5kg of methamphetamine in his check-in luggage in 2013 while attempting to board an international flight from Baiyun airport in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
The man was handed the death penalty by Guangzhou intermediate people’s court
An Australian national has been sentenced to death by a Chinese court for drug trafficking, a verdict that could further inflame tensions between Beijing and Canberra.
Already troubled relations worsened recently after China reacted furiously to Australia’s call for an independent investigation into the origins of the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
I know it is probably mad to yearn for consistency from political leaders, but indulge my winter madness for a few minutes while we review some recent events.
On 8 May, Scott Morrison was keen to convey the news that Australia would be reopening in stages between that Friday and July. The prime minister acknowledged that tracking back to normal would likely spark new Covid-19 infections but he said, more than once, this wasn’t something that should slow the trajectory. “Outbreaks are not a reason to slow things down,” Morrison said. “Outbreaks are going to happen, all premiers and chief ministers understand that.”
The front page of Saturday’s UK edition of The Guardian.
Guardian front page, Saturday 13 June 2020: Johnson 'stoking fear and division' over protests pic.twitter.com/YX3eiFZb7A
Requiring the wearing of masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus in areas at the epicenter of the global pandemic may have prevented tens of thousands of infections, a new study suggests.
Mask-wearing is even more important for preventing the virus’ spread than social distancing and stay-at-home orders, researchers said in the study published in PNAS: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
Content focused on Covid-19 and the protests in Hong Kong and over George Floyd in the US
Twitter has removed more than 170,000 accounts the social media site says are state-linked influence campaigns from China focusing on Hong Kong protests, Covid-19 and the US protests in relation to George Floyd.
The company announced on Thursday that 23,750 core accounts – and 150,000 “amplifier” accounts that boosted the content posted by those core accounts – had been removed from the platform after being linked to an influence campaign from the People’s Republic.
Another 1.5 million people in the US filed for unemployment benefits last week even as states continued to relax their coronavirus quarantine measures, writes Dominic Rushe and Amanda Holpuch in New York.
In just 12 weeks more than 44 million claims have been made for benefits as people lost their jobs. Rehiring appears to have started. Last week the labor department said the unemployment rate had dipped in May to 13.3% from 14.7% in April – although officials said difficulty collecting data meant the figure was probably 3% higher.
Nearly three-quarters of new cases of coronavirus are coming from 10 countries, mostly concentrated in the Americas and south Asia, the director general of the World Health Organization has said.
Speaking at the UN health agency’s member state briefing on Thursday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the global situation was deteriorating, even as Europe appeared to be over the worst of the outbreak.
More than 7 million cases of Covid-19 have now been reported, and more than 408,000 deaths.
Although the situation in Europe is improving, at the global level, it is getting worse. More than 100,000 new cases have been reported each day for the most part of the past two weeks.
The rally, which was scheduled for Saturday afternoon, has been declared a prohibited public gathering
Refugee activists have vowed to push ahead with a planned protest this weekend despite the supreme court prohibiting the event amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Justice Michael Walton on Thursday night granted a NSW police application for the rally to be declared a prohibited public gathering.