Morning mail: Boris Johnson’s Cop26 fears, Victoria police payout, alien false alarm

Good morning. Victoria police will pay a $11.75m settlement to a man who was left a quadriplegic after officers allegedly injured him. And Boris Johnson has labelled Australia’s commitment to net zero by 2050 “heroic” while admitting Cop26 could fall short.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson has admitted Britain could fail to broker adequate enough deals to curb irreversible and devastating climate change at the global summit of world leaders beginning in Scotland later this month. The British prime minister said it was “touch and go” whether the Cop26 event would be a success, as he told businesses it was their job to significantly reduce the amount of single-use plastic they produce and described placing too much responsibility on people to recycle as a “red herring”. Johnson also hailed Australia’s pledge to cut emissions to net zero by 2050 as “a heroic thing”. Scott Morrison’s cabinet was expected to sign off on the deal with the Nationals on Monday night, even with Barnaby Joyce refusing to say if he personally supported the target.

Victoria police will pay an $11.75 million settlement to a man who was left a quadriplegic after officers allegedly injured him while responding to a noise complaint in 2017. Earlier this month, Victoria’s supreme court confirmed the settlement order to Chris Karadaglis, which is believed to be one of the highest paid by the force in its history. Karadaglis alleged in a statement of claim filed to the court last year that he was alone in his home in Warrnambool, in Victoria’s south-west, when three police officers arrived in response to a noise complaint in November, 2017. He claimed he was placed in a headlock, and the officers restrained him with such force that they severely injured his spine, rendering him a quadriplegic.

Sudan’s military has launched a coup, arresting leading politicians and declaring a state of emergency, as thousands of protesters who flooded the streets of Khartoum in opposition reportedly faced gunfire. Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who headed Sudan’s power-sharing sovereign council, justified the seizure of power by saying infighting between the military and civilian parties threatened the country’s stability. The prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, was detained overnight and moved to an undisclosed location after refusing to issue a statement in support of the coup, said the information ministry, which was still apparently under the control of Hamdok’s supporters.

Australia

Australian voters are rethinking immigration after extended border closures, with the number of voters believing levels are too high dropping from 56% in January 2019, and 64% the year before that, to 37% in the latest Guardian Essential survey.

Qantas is in discussion with the federal government after Australians abroad raised concerns they would be hampered from returning home due to differing vaccine requirements for children. The Australian and UK governments currently have different requirements on the vaccination of children. While Australia requires two doses, the UK allows for only one in the vast majority of cases.

The New South Wales government urged the prime minister’s department to remove Santos’ Narrabri gas project from a list of developments it wanted to rush through the approval process, warning it would “undermine public trust”, documents released under freedom of information show.

Nearly half of the refugees and asylum seekers held by the Australian Border Force inside Melbourne’s Park hotel have now tested positive for the Delta strain of Covid-19. Twenty of the 46 men held in the hotel are now confirmed cases.

The world

More than half of Afghanistan’s population is facing acute hunger as the country has been thrown into one of the world’s largest food crises. Almost 23 million Afghans will be hungry due to conflict, drought and an economic downturn, the United Nations has warned.

A former Facebook employee has called for urgent external regulation of the platform, noting that Mark Zuckerberg “has unilateral control over 3 billion people”. The whistleblower released tens of thousands of damaging documents and gave qualified backing to UK government proposals to regulate social media platforms.

Levels of climate-heating gases in the atmosphere hit record levels in 2020, despite coronavirus-related lockdowns, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization has announced.

Alec Baldwin was practising a scene that involved him pointing a gun “towards the camera lens” when it accidentally went off, killing his director of photography, according to a written statement by the film’s director.

A Dutch psychologist has told an interviewer from a newspaper that he gave “suicide powder” to more than 100 people and that he was speaking out in an effort to provoke debate about the Netherlands’ laws on assisted dying.

Recommended reads

“Everyone I know has a closet full of black clothes,” wrote the late writer and director Nora Ephron in an essay called On Maintenance. Here is some expert advice on how to maintain the black items in your wardrobe because, as Ephron wrote, “black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.”

In Hannah Kent’s third novel, Devotion, she loosens her ties to archives, exploring instead the absences and silences of historical texts to search for stories of untold, queer historical romances. “There’s so little representation of queer relationships from that time, and so I started to wonder, ‘Is it even possible to do this within that historical, religious context?’” she tells the Guardian. “That’s really what led to a lot more imagination and creative freedom.”

“Villages, communities, multigenerational living setups: they’re the way we’ve lived for millennia, and are deeply rooted in our cores,” writes Sophie Brickman. “Without them, we wouldn’t have survived as a species.” After spending lockdown with her parents, Brickman saw how helpful it can be to have extra hands to help raise her children, leading her to wonder: should we rethink the nuclear family?

Listen

Billed as the world’s “best, last chance” to get global heating under control, Cop26 has a big goal: to secure global net-zero emissions by 2050 and keep 1.5C within reach.

Australia’s climate report card is poor, following decades of political squabbling, policy failures, leadership coups, climate scepticism and poor planning. And yet most Australians have experienced the worsening climate crisis – devastating bushfires, floods, extreme weather and loss of species and habitat.

Australia v the climate looks at how we got here, what’s gone wrong, and what can be done to change course. Part two, Copenhagen, examines Australia under the Rudd and Gillard governments – when it could have been a contender on climate.

Full Story is Guardian Australia’s daily news podcast. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcasting app.

Sport

Unvaccinated tennis players could be allowed to travel to Melbourne and compete at the Australian Open, according to an email sent to WTA players that appears to contradict previous federal and state government advice. Last week the immigration minister, Alex Hawke, said players who were unvaccinated or would not reveal their vaccine status would not be allowed to enter Australia, placing world No 1 Novak Djokovic in doubt for the January tournament.

Media roundup

The mother of missing four-year-old Cleo Smith has made a heart-wrenching plea on Channel Seven to the person who kidnapped her. “Just bring our girl home safe,” she said. “Give her back to us.” The Victorian premier will be given greater power to declare pandemics and make public health orders enforced for three months at a time, under proposed new laws, the ABC reports.

Coming up

Scott Morrison is expected to unveil how Australia will reach the goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.

The royal commission into Crown Resorts’s Victorian operations, including its Melbourne casino, will hand down its final report.

And if you’ve read this far …

Astronomers searching for alien life thought they had spotted signs of intelligence beyond the solar system – but the signals turned out to be human.

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