Hugely prestigious event for China as Beijing prepares to mark 100th anniversary of ruling Communist party
China’s first crewed spacecraft in nearly five years blasted off from the Gobi desert on Thursday morning, carrying astronauts to the new Tiangong space station.
A Long March-2F rocket carried the three astronauts in the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft, and was expected to dock with Tianhe, the main section of the Tiangong station, about six to eight hours later.
Continue reading...New law says death row prisoners must choose between electric chair and firing squad if lethal drugs aren’t available
South Carolina’s supreme court has blocked the planned executions of two inmates by electrocution, saying they cannot be put to death until they truly have the choice of the firing squad option set out in the state’s newly revised capital punishment law.
The high court on Wednesday halted this month’s scheduled executions of Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens, writing that corrections officials need to put together a firing squad so that inmates can really choose between that or the electric chair.
Continue reading...eBioAtlas programme aims to identify fish, birds, amphibians and land animals in freshwater systems from the Ganges to the Mekong
Concealed by the turbid, swirling waters of the Amazon, the Mekong and the Congo, the biodiversity of the world’s great rivers has largely remained a mystery to scientists. But now a multimillion-pound project aims to describe and identify the web of life in major freshwater ecosystems around the world with “gamechanging” DNA technology.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and UK-based environmental DNA (eDNA) specialists NatureMetrics have launched a partnership to take thousands of water samples from freshwater river systems like the Ganges and the Niger delta to identify the fish, birds, amphibians and land animals that live in and around them.
Continue reading...Data shows only 127 of 323 cities had acceptable PM 2.5 levels despite drop in emissions during lockdowns
More than half of European cities are still plagued by dirty air, new data shows, despite a reduction in traffic emissions and other pollutants during last year’s lockdowns.
Cities in eastern Europe, where coal is still a major source of energy, fared worst of all, with Nowy Sącz in Poland having the most polluted air, followed by Cremona in Italy where industry and geography tend to concentrate air pollution, and Slavonski Brod in Croatia.
Continue reading...Airbnb taskforce that ‘cleans up only after disaster strikes’ intervened after alleged attack, reports Bloomberg Businessweek
An Australian woman who was allegedly raped at knifepoint in an Airbnb apartment in New York received a secret settlement of $7m which included restrictions on what she could say about the incident, according to a media investigation into the vacation listings giant’s “guest safety” policies .
The 29-year-old was attacked in a property near the tourist magnet and central Manhattan crossroads of Times Square early on New Year’s Day in 2016, Bloomberg Businessweek reported, prompting the swift intervention of a dedicated Airbnb crisis management “taskforce”.
Continue reading...US president hails ‘good and positive’ talks but added ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’
The US will retaliate if Russia continues to carry out malicious cyber-attacks against American targets, Joe Biden said on Wednesday, after holding “good and positive” talks in Geneva with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
Speaking after their first face-to-face summit, Biden said he had made clear the Kremlin had to “abide by the rules of the road” or face unspecified consequences. Putin was aware the US possessed “unrivalled” cyber capacities, Biden stressed.
Continue reading...Meeting goes as well as could be expected as Biden and Putin speak language of diplomacy – but hardly one of affection
Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin hadn’t even sat down before tensions boiled over at the 18th-century Villa La Grange, a fine Swiss manor house besieged on Wednesday by a 21st-century press pool. The two men looked cordial enough as they shook hands for the first time as leaders. But the sun-struck journalists behind them pushed and shouted, some knocked to the floor, as they fought to get in to the leaders’ only joint appearance of the day.
“The media scuffle was the most chaotic your pooler has seen at a presidential event in nine years,” wrote a US reporter from inside the melee, which erupted as the press pack tried to follow the two leaders into the villa. “Russian security yelled at journalists to get out and began pushing journalists. Journalists and White House officials screamed back that the Russian security should stop touching us.”
Continue reading...Cool normality helped exorcise ghost of 2018’s disastrous Helsinki summit but what else was achieved?
1) The weird and unpredictable Trump era is over. In 2018 Donald Trump held a disastrous summit with Putin in the Finnish capital Helsinki. The then US president said he believed Putin’s assurances that Moscow did not interfere in the 2016 US election with a joint press conference that was so humiliating for America that Trump’s senior adviser Fiona Hill considered bringing it to a close by whacking a fire alarm or faking a medical emergency.
In Geneva, by contrast, cool normality was on display. Biden was well prepared for the US-Russia summit. He cut a relaxed figure, telling Putin he wanted a “predictable” relationship after a period defined by rogue Kremlin behaviour. The summit flowed along conventional diplomatic lines: a handshake, several hours of intensive talks and separate press conferences afterwards. The ghost of Helsinki was exorcised. There will be an agreed record of what was discussed, unlike in 2018 when Trump met Putin alone, without aides or even Trump’s own interpreter. We don’t know what was said.
Continue reading...Bruno Garcia-Cruciani’s murder of Julie Douib in Corsica became a rallying call against domestic killings
A man who murdered the mother of their two children on the island of Corsica in March 2019 has been sentenced to life in prison in a case that caused an outcry over domestic killings of women in France.
Julie Douib was shot dead by her former partner of 14 years, Bruno Garcia-Cruciani, a few days after learning that prosecutors had closed a case she brought against him for threatening behaviour, harassment and assault.
Continue reading...French will no longer have to wear masks outside and curfew to end while Spain also planning to lift rule
France and Spain are moving to ease rules around wearing face masks outside, in a development attributed by both countries to their Covid-19 vaccination campaigns.
In France, people will no longer be required to wear masks outdoors from Thursday, though they will still be obligatory on public transport, in sports stadiums and other crowded places. A nightly curfew will end as of Sunday.
Continue reading...Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin will talk for four-five hours before making separate press appearances
A Russian state-owned media agency has shared a photo of Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin’s expanded bilateral meeting, which started about an hour ago.
Первые кадры с расширенных переговоров Президентов России и США Владимира Путина и Джозефа Байдена
@rian_ru pic.twitter.com/y5nwV4Uu3s
Away from Geneva, the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports on the rise in threats against election officials:
One in three election officials feel unsafe in their jobs, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Brennan Center for Justice. One in five election workers said threats to their lives were a concern related to their job.
Related: How Republicans came to embrace the big lie of a stolen election
Continue reading...The company has been addressing its historical racism and sexism, adding disclaimers to films and altering theme park rides. But these moves have stirred contempt as well as approval
Very little ammunition is required for a culture war these days, so long as your troops are primed to mobilise at the drop of a blog. Julie Tremaine and Katie Dowd, two writers for the online newspaper SFGate, discovered this last month. Their review of the revamped Snow White ride at Disneyland was generally positive, but queried a new scene showing the prince giving Snow White the all-important “true love’s kiss”.
“A kiss he gives to her without her consent, while she’s asleep, which cannot possibly be true love if only one person knows it’s happening,” they wrote. “It’s hard to understand why the Disneyland of 2021 would choose to add a scene with such old-fashioned ideas of what a man is allowed to do to a woman.”
Matters escalated quickly and predictably. Within 24 hours, the review was reported across Twitter and conservative media. Fox News ran 13 segments on the story in one day: “Cancel culture going after Snow White”; “The woke movement taking aim at Disneyland”, etc. Senator John Kennedy was brought on to express his disdain: “We are so screwed … I don’t know where these jackaloons come up with this stuff.” The UK’s Sun chimed in: “Snow White may be CANCELED” [sic]. As did Piers Morgan in the Daily Mail: “Leave Snow White’s Prince alone, you insufferable woke brats.” Then Fox News reported on that: “Piers Morgan slams consent criticism over revamped Snow White ride.” And so forth. All of them triggered by a single paragraph in an online review.
Disney increasingly finds itself caught in the crossfire of these skirmishes. Understandably, to some extent, since it is the biggest target. Already a byword for family entertainment, Disney is now the dominant purveyor of popular culture following its gradual acquisitions of Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, Avatar, Alien, The Muppets, The Simpsons and numerous other household-name properties. But having successfully captured entertainment’s centre ground, Disney now finds itself under attack on both flanks. From one side, it is criticised for its old-fashioned and bigoted legacy; from the other, it is criticised for being too “woke”. What’s an unprecedentedly powerful media corporation to do?
France to also end mandatory mask wearing outside; Indian government extends gap between doses to 16 weeks
Portugal has said it would allow US visitors into the country, as it scrambles to shore up its tourism sector, but added Nepal to a list of “red” nations amid concerns over Covid variants.
Reuters reports that Portugal is now open to tourists from EU countries and Britain but they must show a negative Covid-19 test result on arrival. Since 15 June, rules applied to UK visitors also apply to those coming from the United States, the government said.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s removal of two Coca-Cola bottles during a press conference at coincided with a $4bn fall in drinks company’s share price. But with obesity being one of the main risk factors for the worst cases of Covid, what have governments done to ensure people have lived as healthily as possible during stringent lockdowns?
Related: Cristiano Ronaldo snub wipes billions off Coca-Cola’s market value
Related: Mexico state bans sale of sugary drinks and junk food to children
Continue reading...The meeting got off to a frosty start as Putin told Biden in front of a chaotic press pool jostling to put questions to the leaders that their two countries had 'a lot' of issues that required talks at the highest level. 'I think it's always better to meet face to face,' Biden said, adding that he hoped they could find 'predictable and rational ways to disagree'
Continue reading...Mining company Debswana shows the 1,098-carat stone to the country’s president, Mokgweetsi Masisi
The diamond firm Debswana has announced the discovery in Botswana of a 1,098-carat stone that it described as the third largest of its kind in the world.
The company showed the stone, which was found on 1 June, to the country’s president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, in the capital Gaborone.
Continue reading...High court ruling leaves open possibility of criminal involvement, in victory for family
A Malaysian court has overturned the findings of an inquest into the death of the French-Irish teenager Nora Anne Quoirin, stating that the coroner was wrong to conclude she died as a result of misadventure.
The high court judge Azizul Azmi Adnan instead issued an open verdict, which does not rule out the possibility of criminal involvement and could pave the way for further investigations into her disappearance.
Continue reading...After shaking hands for the cameras, the US president, Joe Biden, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, plunged into hours of face-to-face talks on Wednesday at a lush lakeside Swiss mansion. It was a highly anticipated summit at a time of heightened tensions between the two countries
Continue reading...Irish deputy PM’s remarks ‘unhelpful and ill-advised’, says Northern Ireland secretary
The British government has rebuked Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Leo Varadkar, for saying he believed there could be a united Ireland within his lifetime.
Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, told the Commons on Wednesday the comments were “unhelpful and ill-advised”.
Continue reading...Judge said there was no reason to delay transfer any longer and denied lawyer’s request to keep him at a state prison in New York
Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein will be extradited to California after a New York judge’s approval, where he faces additional sexual assault charges.
The extradition order ends a legal fight, prolonged by the pandemic, the defense’s concerns about Weinstein’s failing health, and a squabble over paperwork.
Continue reading...Bavarian minister says activist could have ‘paid with life’ for stunt before Germany v France game in Munich
A Greenpeace protester who parachuted into the stadium before Germany’s Euro 2020 match against France in Munich was lucky not to have been shot down by anti-terror marksmen enforcing a no-fly zone, a state minister has said.
Two people were injured when the activist lost control of his powered paraglider, which had a motor attached to his back, and hit overhead camera wires attached to the stadium roof. Fans ducked as he careered towards the spectator area, narrowly missing the stands and demolishing technical equipment before crashing in front of the German penalty area.
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