Spanish police and customs officers have intercepted the largest known consignment of cocaine ever to reach the country, seizing more than 13 tonnes of the drug, hidden in a cargo of bananas shipped from Ecuador. Spain’s Policía Nacional said the seizure was the second largest recorded in Europe and one of the largest anywhere in…
Ministers may stop new council houses in England from being sold under the right to buy scheme, Angela Rayner has indicated. The deputy prime minister said the government would introduce restrictions on new social housing “so we aren’t losing that stock”. Since it was launched by Margaret Thatcher in 1980, the right to buy scheme…
Donald Trump is “capable of looking past” things people have said about him in the past, one of Keir Starmer’s closest allies has said. Pat McFadden, a Cabinet Office minister, said he thought the new US and UK governments would “get on well” despite the history of senior Labour ministers criticising Trump. David Lammy, the…
Pauline Hanson has threatened to take Emily Kim, a Brisbane city councillor to the Human Rights Commission, claiming racial vilification for Kim describing One Nation as “racist”. Kim, a Labor councillor received a letter from Hanson’s legal representative Donald Bundesen by email on 25 October, the day before Queensland’s state election. It referenced a campaign…
The Paralympic champion Tanni Grey-Thompson is to lead a new taskforce created to improve air travel for disabled passengers, the transport secretary, Louise Haigh, has announced. The taskforce will spend nine months speaking to disabled passengers to establish what are the biggest barriers to air travel, and working with the aviation industry to find short-…
A nine-year prison term for a man who killed two migrant sex workers within 24 hours shows that the justice system values their lives less than others, advocates say. The Chinese student Xiaozheng Lin, 24, could walk from jail in seven years with time already served after he pleaded guilty to two manslaughter charges. He…
The head of Queensland’s Indigenous truth-telling and healing inquiry says the new minister has called off their first meeting by email, as the government prepares to pass a law eliminating the body. The inquiry chair, Joshua Creamer, revealed on Wednesday that he was scheduled to meet with the minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander…
Australia’s ambassador in Washington, Kevin Rudd, deleted comments he previously made about Donald Trump after the Republican’s election win, saying on Thursday they did not reflect the view of the Australian government. Rudd, a former prime minister, had previously made the comments about Trump in his capacity as the head of a US-based thinktank, a…
The Democrat and former Trump administration official Eugene Vindman has won his House race against the Republican and former army green beret Derrick Anderson in Virginia’s seventh congressional district, representing a key victory for Democrats as they cling to the last glimmers of hope of regaining a majority in the lower chamber. When the Associated…
A 12-year-old boy was among five people who died in the fiery crash of a small business jet near a suburban Phoenix airport, authorities said Wednesday. Preliminary information indicated the six-seater HondaJet HA-420 aircraft was headed to Provo, Utah, when it aborted takeoff at the Falcon Field airport in Mesa on Tuesday afternoon. The plane…
