Australia news live: Victorian state Labor conference continues after premier condemns behaviour of Saturday pro-Palestine protesters

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Group of protesters entered the Moonee Valley Racecourse building on Saturday morning ahead of speeches by Jacinta Allan and the PM. Follow the day’s news live

Chalmers calls Dutton’s budget reply and criticisms that immigration leads to pressure on housing “dark” and intentionally divisive". Chalmers says Dutton’s reply is based on “numbers that he has plucked out of the air”.

If you think about the relationship between migration and housing, for example, of the less than 5,000 homes purchased by foreigners in the most recent data, around 1,300 of them were established homes, and so this will make nowhere near the difference that he is claiming that it will.

We need a sensible migration program to find the nurses, and the builders, and other people that we need to ensure that our economy can continue to grow into the future.

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Hospitals to share waiting lists under Labour plans for quicker care

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Party says pooling resources across regions would deliver 40,000 extra appointments a week for patients

Hospitals would have to share waiting lists and pool resources under Labour’s plans to reduce waiting times by delivering up to 40,000 extra NHS appointments a week.

The party has announced that patients would be offered appointments at nearby hospitals, rather than necessarily at their local one, which would enable people to receive faster treatment. Hospital staff and resources would be pooled across a region and would run evening and weekend surgeries.

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Tony O’Reilly, one of Ireland’s leading business figures, dies aged 88

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O’Reilly, who was also an international rugby player for Ireland and the British and Irish Lions, died in Dublin on Saturday

Tony O’Reilly, one of Ireland’s leading business figures, has died at the age of 88.

O’Reilly, who had a career in the media as well as being an international rugby player for Ireland and the British and Irish Lions, died in St Vincent’s hospital in Dublin on Saturday.

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Nadhim Zahawi says it was a mistake for Tories to force Boris Johnson from No 10

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Former chancellor, who was one of those who urged Johnson to go, says Tories should have realised ‘Twitter was not the country’

Former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has said he and his Conservative colleagues were wrong to force out Boris Johnson as prime minister in 2022.

Johnson resigned after less than three years in No 10 after more than 50 resignations from government of MPs and staff and waves of backbenchers urging him to quit over the handling of the Chris Pincher affair and numerous other scandals. He resigned as an MP a year later.

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Israeli minister vows to quit war cabinet if PM fails to agree new Gaza plan

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Benny Gantz’s threat to withdraw his opposition party from coalition calls into question future of government

The Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz has threatened to resign if Benjamin Netanyahu fails to adopt an agreed plan for Gaza, calling into question the future of the Israeli government.

During a press conference on Saturday, Gantz announced that if a plan for postwar governance of the territory is not consolidated and approved by 8 June, his opposition National Unity party will withdraw from the coalition government.

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Third of voters believe Starmer was wrong to let Elphicke into Labour party

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In latest Opinium poll, only 16% say accepting rightwing Tory MP’s defection was the right move – against 33% who see it as a mistake

More voters believe Keir Starmer was wrong to allow a rightwing Tory MP into Labour than think it was the right move, after anger from within the party’s ranks over the defection.

Natalie Elphicke, the Dover MP, said the Tories had become “a byword for incompetence and division” when she made her shock departure to Labour earlier in May. The party leadership regarded it as a major coup to win the support of the MP on the frontline of the Channel crossings issue that Rishi Sunak has attempted to prioritise. The move came despite concerns among MPs that her views conflict with Labour in a variety of areas.

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Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ ubiquitous in Great Lakes basin, study finds

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PFAS chemicals present in air, rain, atmosphere and water in basin, which holds nearly 95% of US freshwater

Toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” are ubiquitous in the Great Lakes basin’s air, rain, atmosphere and water, new peer-reviewed research shows.

The first-of-its-kind, comprehensive picture of PFAS levels for the basin, which holds nearly 95% of the nation’s freshwater, also reveals that precipitation is probably a major contributor to the lakes’ contamination.

This story was amended on 18 May 2024 to clarify that Buffalo does not border Lake Ontario.

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Police arrest six student protesters at University of Pennsylvania

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Pro-Palestinian students were attempting to take over a university hall to protest school’s refusal to negotiate in ‘good faith’

More than a dozen pro-Palestinian activists, including six students at the University of Pennsylvania, were arrested after attempting to occupy a hall on the university campus late Friday.

The protesters were arrested around 9pm after trying to take over Fisher-Bennett Hall but had been met with a response from university and Philadelphia police, according to reports. The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that protesters caused the evacuation of an alumni event at the Penn Museum.

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Jeremy Hunt urged to honour pledge on infected blood compensation payouts

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As the inquiry publishes its final report, the chancellor is under pressure to find £10bn to put right a longstanding injustice

The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will come under pressure to stay true to his word and sign off on immediate compensation payments totalling up to £10bn to victims of the contaminated blood scandal when the long-awaited final report on the affair is published on Monday.

The scandal is described as the worst treatment disaster in NHS history, with more than 3,000 people having died as a result of receiving contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. It is estimated that, even today, a person infected during the scandal dies every four days.

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Islamic Jihad leader killed in West Bank and 70 targets hit in Gaza, says Israel

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IDF says ‘senior terrorist operative’ Islam Khamayseh was killed in strike on the city of Jenin

Israel says its jets have struck 70 targets across Gaza in the past 24 hours, while an airstrike in Jenin killed a “significant” Islamic Jihad figure who operated as the head of logistics for the organisation’s brigade in the city.

The strike, carried out on Friday night by a fighter jet and a helicopter, killed Islam Khamayseh, a “senior terrorist operative in the Jenin camp” who was responsible for a series of attacks in the area, the IDF said.

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Fresh floods in Afghanistan kill at least 60 after heavy rain brings devastation

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Thousands of homes and farming land damaged in Ghor province, a week after over 300 people killed in flash floods

At least 60 people have been killed in a fresh bout of heavy rain and flooding in central Afghanistan, according to an official.

Dozens others remained missing, said Abdul Wahid Hamas, spokesperson for Ghor’s provincial governor, on Saturday. He said the province had suffered significant financial losses, with thousands of homes and properties damaged and hundreds of hectares of agricultural land destroyed in the floods on Friday, including in the province’s capital city, Feroz Koh.

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Fewer than one in 10 arts workers in UK have working-class roots

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The cultural sector falls short on other measures of diversity too, with 9o% of workers white, says new report

Six in 10 of all arts and culture workers in the UK now come from middle-class backgrounds, compared with just over 42% of the wider workforce, according to new research.

And while 23% of the UK workforce is from a working-class background, working-class people are underrepresented in every area of arts and culture. They make up 8.4% of those working in film, TV, radio and photography, while in museums, archives and libraries, the proportion is only 5.2%.

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Six-month-old baby shot repeatedly during Arizona standoff with child’s father

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Police were able to rescue child, who is in hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, before house caught fire with father still in it

A six-month-old baby is currently hospitalized after a man allegedly shot the infant several times during an armed home standoff in Surprise, Arizona, about 30 miles north-west of Phoenix.

At about 3am on Friday, the father of the child allegedly broke into the home where the child and mother lived, according to Surprise police. The child’s father did not live in the house, police said, adding that the man held the mother and child hostage for several hours before the mother managed to escape.

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Virginia governor allows Confederate groups to keep tax exemptions

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Republican Glenn Youngkin also vetoed bills related to maintaining access to contraception, saying they were ‘not ready’

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has vetoed two bills that would have stripped tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that has opposed the removal of statues of southern state generals during the US civil war and other markers of the southern states’ attempt to secede from the Union in defense of slavery.

The Republican governor vetoed several measures, including those related to maintaining access to contraception, saying in a statement they were “not ready to become law”.

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Suspect in court as Putin’s friends capitalise on shooting of Slovakian PM Robert Fico

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Media is barred from hearing as 71-year-old man appears in closed session over attempted assassination of prime minister

The suspect in the shooting of Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico appeared in a closed court hearing on Saturday outside Bratislava amid growing fears about the future of the deeply divided nation.

The media was barred from the hearing, and reporters were kept behind a gate by armed police officers wearing balaclavas.

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Hamas ‘rejects’ any military presence in Gaza as aid begins to arrive along US-made pier – as it happened

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This live blog is now closed, you can read more of our Israel-Gaza war coverage here

Israel on Friday attacked South Africa’s case against it in the international court of justice as an “obscene exploitation” of the genocide convention, claiming it aimed not to protect Palestinian civilians but to defend Hamas militants.

Israel’s representatives told the court their country was fighting a war of self-defence it “did not want and did not start”. They said Israel had made “extraordinary” efforts to protect civilians, and had complied with orders from the court to let more aid into Gaza.

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Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude brings fame to Gabriel García Márquez’s Colombian hometown

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Locals hope TV adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude will bring new life to Aracataca, birthplace of author’s magical realism

In sweltering mid-afternoon heat, children splash in the clear water of the canal that threads through town as elderly neighbours look on from rocking chairs on the porches of their sun-washed houses. Butterflies spring from every bush, sometimes fluttering together in kaleidoscopes.

At the foot of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, about 20 miles from the Caribbean coast, Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional world of Macondo lives on.

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Alabama poultry plant could be closed for 30 days for allegedly hiring minors

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At least two children have already been killed while working in Mar-Jac Poultry plants in the US south over the last year

A poultry plant in Jasper, Alabama, has been accused of hiring minors and could be shut down for 30 days, according to a newly released US Department of Labor lawsuit.

Mar-Jac Poultry, the largest employer in Walker county, is accused of violating federal labor laws when it hired four minors as young as 16 who were allegedly discovered working overnight at the company’s slaughterhouse.

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