New Zealand prime minister starts campaign with a sleepover at the ‘folks’ in the small rural town of Morrinsville
New Zealand’s prime minister has launched her election tour of the country from her parents’ home in rural Waikato – so her “folks” can babysit.
The rescheduled general election, now taking place on 17 October, is unlike any the country has seen before, with party leaders hitting the campaign trail in face masks and practising social distancing.
Continue reading...Researchers in Andes find temperature a record for all birds and non-hibernating mammals
Hummingbirds have scooped another record: they are not only tiny but can reach body temperatures below that of any non-hibernating mammal and any other bird.
The hummingbird is among a number of small creatures, including certain bats, that can enter a state known as daily torpor, a phenomenon where they turn down their metabolism and body temperature to save energy.
Continue reading...Refugees were evacuated from a large camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on Wednesday after fires broke out at multiple points around the site. More than 12,000 people live at the Moria camp and the surrounding area. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
Continue reading...The president’s fixer wanted to be a Goodfella but ended up taking a fall. His revenge is a tawdrily readable tell-all memoir
Michael Cohen is no saint. Aside from the obvious, Donald Trump’s former fixer has never entered into a formal cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors, a fact duly noted by the US attorneys’ office for the southern district of New York in its sentencing memorandum. Because of that, the “inability to fully vet his criminal history and reliability impact his utility as a witness”.
Related: Michael Cohen book details Trump's racism and toxic family dynamic
Continue reading...Altering terms of withdrawal agreement on Northern Ireland could damage relations under Biden presidency
Senior Democrats have warned that any attempt by the UK government to backtrack on the Brexit agreement on Northern Ireland would jeopardize a future US-UK free trade deal and could hobble bilateral relations across the board if Joe Biden wins the presidency.
Biden, an Irish American, is a staunch defender of the Good Friday Agreement, of which the US is the guarantor, and which requires an open border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Continue reading...Reporting in China has historically been difficult, but Beijing is now using journalists to retaliate against governments with whom it disagrees
Last Wednesday in the middle of the night, Australian reporters Bill Birtles in Beijing and Mike Smith in Shanghai received simultaneous knocks on the door of their homes. Outside were groups of state security officers, there to inform the journalists they were needed for questioning over a national security matter. In case they were thinking of leaving, they had also been placed under exit bans.
Smith had already packed his bags and Birtles was that night hosting a farewell party, having been warned by Australian government officials of an increased risk to their safety after the recent detention of another Australian journalist Cheng Lei.
Continue reading...During an interview with Russian journalists, Alexander Lukashenko said the massive protests in his country have been 'tragic' for him but insisted that he has retained the support of most of the country. The Belarusian president blamed the US for instigating the protests and warned Russia that it could face similar demonstrations in the future.
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The race to succeed Bill de Blasio as New York mayor has a new potential entrant.
Kathryn Garcia, the city’s sanitation commissioner and one of de Blasio’s most trusted cabinet members, resigned on Tuesday in anticipation of a run.
Michael Cohen’s Trump book is out today and it may or may not be a coincidence that the president was exceedingly busy on Twitter this morning as NBC’s Today was broadcasting excerpts of in interview between his former lawyer and fixer and Lester Holt, of NBC Nightly News.
Related: Michael Cohen book details Trump's racism and toxic family dynamic
Continue reading...President tells Russian journalists that if he resigned the opposition would destroy Belarus
The Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, has used his first interview since mass protests erupted against his rule to say he does not plan to step down soon.
Lukashenko spoke to a group of pro-Kremlin Russian journalists including the editor-in-chief of Russia Today, Margarita Simonyan, and made it clear he plans to fight to cling on to power.
Continue reading...Reported video confessions could be used as evidence in international criminal court
Two Myanmar soldiers have detailed a campaign of blanket killings, rape and mass burials of Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state in video testimony that could be used as evidence of crimes against humanity in the international criminal court (ICC).
The confessions, seen by the New York Times and the human rights organisation Fortify Rights, reportedly show Pte Myo Win Tun and Pte Zaw Naing speaking about what they say were orders for them to “kill all you see”, as well as destroying dozens of villages.
Continue reading...Cartoonist ‘Coco’ gives evidence at trial of 14 suspects accused of complicity in 2015 Paris attacks
A survivor of the Charlie Hebdo massacre has described how Islamist terrorists forced her to open the door of the satirical newspaper’s offices at gunpoint as they arrived to murder 11 people.
Corinne Rey, a cartoonist known as “Coco”, told a Paris court she was convinced she was about to die as the brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi entered the building saying: “We want Charlie Hebdo.”
Continue reading...Graphic footage originally broadcast on Facebook has spread across social network
TikTok is battling to remove a graphic video of a livestreamed suicide, after the footage was uploaded to the service on Sunday night from Facebook, where it was initially broadcast.
Although the footage was rapidly taken down from TikTok, users spent much of Monday re-uploading it, initially unchanged, but later incorporated into so-called bait-and-switch videos, which are designed to shock and upset unsuspecting users.
Continue reading...Footage released by the Belarusian border committee shows a car said to show the opposition figure Maria Kolesnikova driving to the Alexandrovka border with Ukraine in the early hours of Tuesday.
Kolesnikova, who was kidnapped from the centre of Minsk on Monday, reportedly avoided deportation by ripping up her passport. Two other activists with her, Anton Rodnenkov and Ivan Kravtsov, are in Ukraine, officials in Kyiv confirmed
Continue reading...Health authorities across continent try to reach under 30s as cases among younger people rise
As the number of Covid-19 cases rises sharply in parts of Europe, health authorities from the UK to Spain are calling on young people to do more to halt the spread of the virus. This is how the situation looks in a number of major European countries and how it is being tackled.
Continue reading...With nightlife in limbo due to Covid-19, the legendary temple of techno has reinvented itself as art gallery – with works by Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson, Wolfgang Tillmans and more
Inside a disused power station in east Berlin, a red-and-white buoy is bobbing mid-air, swooping six metres up and six metres down in rhythm to imaginary waves. The artist who had the idea to hang it there, Julius von Bismarck, has connected an automated pulley system via sensors to a real buoy in the Atlantic Ocean, mirroring its movements.
Usually, the waves crashing over the heads of visitors to these halls are made of sound, pumped out of a custom-built PA that many dance music connoisseurs consider the finest in the world: this is Berghain, Berlin’s mythical temple of bassy industrial techno.
Continue reading...Mairead McGuinness to take role in overseeing access for the City of London to EU markets
The veteran MEP Mairead McGuinness has been proposed as Ireland’s new EU commissioner, replacing Phil Hogan, who was forced to resign after breaching coronavirus lockdown rules.
McGuinness, a European parliament vice-president, would take on the portfolio of financial services, giving her a key role in overseeing access for the City of London to EU markets.
Continue reading...Majid Majidi’s cast of young toughs digging for treasure under a school deliver a heart-rending story with unexpected depth of emotion
Sun Children, by the Iranian director Majid Majidi, gives us a prison-break drama that is escaping to nowhere, and a knockabout school comedy gone horribly wrong. The acting is broad, the plot gears often creak, but it has guts and heart and a grubby, street-smart charisma. It’s one of the finest films playing in this year’s Venice competition.
Dedicated to “the 152m children forced into child labour”, this casts 12-year-old Roohollah Zamani as Ali, the pint-sized boss of a gang of thieves, a miniature wheel inside a much bigger machine, working for an unnamed local crime boss who skulks on the rooftop amid his pigeon coops. The boss wants Ali to retrieve a hoard of unspecified treasure, which is either buried in the local graveyard or in the drainage pipe that runs beside it. And the only way he can do it is to go back to school.
Continue reading...Zhong Shanshan’s net worth rises to $51bn as Nongfu Spring shares launch in Hong Kong
The stock market flotation of China’s biggest bottle water company has made its founder the country’s third-richest man, as shares in his company rocketed on their debut in Hong Kong.
At one point the paper fortune of Zhong Shanshan, the biggest shareholder in bottled water company Nongfu Spring, briefly surpassed that of China’s two richest men, Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Tencent founder Pony Ma.
Continue reading...Lawyers for Paul Rusesabagina, who is detained in Kigali, say he faces serious risk of torture
Lawyers for Paul Rusesabagina have called on a UN investigator to immediately intervene in the case of the human rights activist – and inspiration behind the film Hotel Rwanda – who is being detained in Rwanda and is alleged to face a “serious risk of torture”.
The letter to Nils Melzer, the special rapporteur on torture, comes one week after Rusesabagina, a prominent critic of the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, was revealed to have been brought to Kigali from Dubai in what his lawyers have called an illegal rendition.
Continue reading...Educators in the disputed region are fighting to keep pupils on track amid repeated lockdowns, curfews and internet blackouts
Asmat Jan, 15, practises her singing in a meadow, against a backdrop of Kashmir’s towering mountains. In front of her, around 50 other children squat in perfect, straight lines. A couple of adults hover nearby.
Education has gone open-air across the valley in Indian-administered Kashmir and this is one of the many makeshift community classes that have sprung up in response to the repeated closure of schools under two separate lockdowns, alongside a communication blackout in this hotly disputed territory imposed in August last year. While political restrictions have eased a little in Kashmir since India revoked the region’s special status and degree of autonomy, a brief reopening of education in February lasted only until April’s Covid-19 lockdown brought classes to yet another grinding halt.
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